The King…

Well well well! Here I am after a little vacation away from blogging (and shooting!). Meanwhile, despite this vacation, which was supposed to help me calm down, I did have my own share of stressors away from the camera business; Work, house, personal life, you name it. Oh, mentioning work, I'm officially considered to be "working from home" though I'm not doing much really, but there is quite a mess in the management that leaves me wondering if everything is alright. Really; attendance record must be kept by my director (yes, though we are at home, don't ask me how or why) and other things.
On the other hand, I'm trying to get some "life" for myself. I'm processing old images in some new methods and techniques, I go reading in the morning in the yard to get some sun exposure (beside having some supplements as well with meals), I stroll through languages, and I water the plants almost daily as well; Well, though it's done under the harsh sun of 7:00 a.m. or so, still it has some refreshing feeling specially when you see those little buds grow bigger and bigger. On the side, I'm also having sleep as much as I can, almost whenever I want!
Meanwhile, I'm also wondering these days about the future of my Ayvarith conlang (which ironically this blog was supposed to be about it) after the Instagram account for it (@Ayvarith) had been hacked or simply stopped (just not sure what's going on there). Anyway I don't think I will be having another Instagram account just for Ayvarith, again. I'm done with this stupid platform. So, I'm wondering what's next on that plane.

The King

So, in this blog post (the first after some vacation here) I want to showcase some images that I've shot for a project that started by a coincidence, and ended (unfortunately) abruptly. I've talked about this little project in my previous post (or posts) I guess but didn't show anything from this series I guess. So, this post is for these images, which were done some months ago.

Quarantine Day 54
King of The Bathroom

The whole series started with an idea for a single shot back in the early days of quarantine (back in April). The idea struck me at the spur of the moment when I thought that maybe I should clean my bathroom after months of neglect (ahem). I had an eye for humor in this shot from the very beginning, so I was thinking of something artistic and funny away from the "contest culture" and the seriousness that I would usually work with, so I went on with shooting for HDR. The space in the bathroom was quite narrow so I had to take refuge in my Sigma DG 12-24mm lens (which proved to be one of my favorite lenses for shooting portraits!). I could have used my Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens here which has a wider field of view and could have saved me here as well BUT such field of view will be problematic, as it will include so much from the surrounding area and eventually I would have to crop so much, and the image would become smaller and probably insignificant.

Quarantine Day 67

Soon, however, ideas from that single shot started to stem out and my mind started to create a story in fact. Ironically, a story that I've imagined its ending but not its progress so starting from this shot for Quarantine Day 67, I've actually started to fill the story gaps somewhat.The crown, the green robe, the toilet seat and the pipe all occurred to me as "trade mark" for this series starting from this shot. Also from this shot for Day 67, I've stopped giving titles, but rather captions right away. The caption for Quarantine Day 67 is: I don't get it, I should've been a superhero according to this...!

Just for the record: I didn't buy any astrology books in a long time. This book you see here is a gift from a friend.

Again, the shooting for Day 67 was done in a similar manner: HDR, Sigma DG 12-24mm, but the location this time is different. It was my brother's old bathroom (not used much and has less clutter and no bathtub).

Quarantine Day 73

 And so the story continues actually and another part of it was made, with Quarantine Day 73. By the way, in case you are wondering by now about the number of days here, I'm actually counting the days indeed (approximately) starting from February 25^th, 2020; around which the whole quarantine vacation started (and that was the National Day break). Now, Quarantine Day 73 was somewhat hard to do and I'm not quite satisfied with it as I think the ball with (my) face should have been clearer (and terrifying more). Anyway, the caption that went with this image was: I made a new friend. His name is Corna... Crona... something like that. He's nice.... I think?
Again, Day 73 shot was made in my bathroom and I did work quite some time to clone out stuff behind me and stuff on the ball itself and then add my face (which was shot separately in another shot and copied from there to the shot). I'm not including here the talk about the HDR rendering or tone-mapping as it is a basic process right now but worth noting that I do spend quite some time trying to find a tones that I like for each shot in this series; They are not tone-mapped under the same settings every time. Each one processed differently. In Day 73 shot specifically I've striven to tone-map the HDR slide in a way mimicking the ink sketches or comics as much as possible by brightening the tones and darkening the shadows while reducing the saturation of the skin tones a bit.

Quarantine Day 80

Then comes the only shot in the series where I used mt Rokinon 8mm fisheye lens. I was forced because of the angle I wanted to use as well as adding a dramatic look, and of course the narrow space. I should have used my brother's bathroom again here but for some reason I can't remember right now, I didn't. At this stage, I've already broke many taboos: Editing in Photoshop, HDR unreasonable tone-mapping, and more. So, I've set my thought on doing a collage between two shots showing myself being sick of myself. The caption that went with this shot was: The whole kingdom went into total lock-down. Sitting by myself reflecting trying to find solutions, but apparently myself is... sick of myself.
The blend of the two images was not easy as well and actually I almost wanted to abandon the whole idea altogether or shoot again (and in the back of my mind I did envision this shot differently actually). But with a lengthy work with layer masks and cloning, I think I've kind of pinned it down, even though I wished for two separate heads sharing a neck (go ahead and imagine that!). Worth noting that it is at this image that I've decided to stop my Instagram account. Actually I've posted the image and barely received any likes for about 24 hours, so I realized that I'm really wasting my time with the so-called Instagram's Algorithm and trying to expose my work to others. Thus, I've completely abandoned the idea of posting to that platform altogether.

Quarantine Day 92

Despite stopping Instagram posts, I've still had some more ideas to work with this project, as I had somewhat a story going on in my head. The phase now is at the king is escaping his enemies. For this, I've made Quarantine Day 92 that you see here with a caption that goes: Escaping the enemy with the kingdom in total lock-down drove me to some unprecedented measures. Thank goodness, I kept some water supply.
This photo included more work than the previous 2 shots here. Two shots combined, and a lot of work with the wrap and puppet warp tool in Photoshop to fit my body inside the fridge (and adding some shadows to make it as realistic as possible). But probably the real struggle was to cut the head and lower it down without much artifacts. In fact, on a close inspection some motion blue is prevalent because shooting HDRs in such position is not something... I want to try again. A shaky body was inevitable. Another struggle here was matching the lighting conditions (to approximate the looks, I've shot myself in front of a window so the light would hit my back like the light inside the fridge). The rest was a work of toning and adjusting contrast. 

At this point, the series ended abruptly. I had more ideas, but I didn't have the power to pursue them further. I wanted to continue the story with the king escaping through various locations around the house (had an eye for the washing machine), but all that I had to stop as I didn't have more power to do all of that, specially that I'm working all alone. The mood swings and the conditions at home all had their toll on me that I seriously needed some peace of mind. In fact, as I'm typing these words, I didn't touch my camera seriously all that time except for few shots just days before I start typing these words, doing some macro shots in the yard, just out of curiosity. 

Finale

Nostalgia

Now, this is the series that I've talked about in previous posts. On the side, there are a lot of old images that had been re-edited, some of them were neglected and completely forgotten (and deemed useless), but suddenly with me learning new techniques and ideas in editing, I've started to check for possible chances, going back in time as far as 2011, like this Nostalgia shot taken on my way to work back then. Anyway, I don't want to proceed further or I might go on and talk about many past images that have undergone a re-make!
Work-wise, I'm considered "at work" as I'm working from home, supposedly. But not much to be done really (like in normal situation anyway). But I had to go to work for mundane tasks that, as I deem, just plain stupid and unnecessary since we are not going back to our offices any time soon. The tasks involved, simply, opening doors for the janitor to clean (in the beginning I thought that there would be a professional disinfection and sterilization process). I was asked to go again to run a test on some device which for some reason I was not told about when I was there, which made me mad and I've refused to go all the way just to do a 30 minutes work.
Strangely, during such a lock-down and being at home most of the time, and the recent incident, all that made me feel sick of work even further even though I'm not going to it. I've realized as well that there are some people who can be quite annoying when they are not around more than when they are around in fact. Strange how life works. 
Meanwhile, my feelings of isolation are growing; That is, inner isolation and not being connected to anyone, or anything (well, almost). The idea of having my own home where I can live as I like, without annoying or being annoyed by any, had been occupying my mind for almost every passing single day. Yet, I'm not sure how this is to be done specially in a place like this. Would it be that my dream cannot be here and elsewhere, away. If so, I just don't know how this is done either, nor how my finances would sustain such a leap… in God, I trust.
 

Xiŋwiñzaji!

A somehow idle week with iterative sleeping problems. Not sure though if the sleeping problems are related to my back and legs muscles pain, or are they related to my busy mind. Because of this, my activities were minimal and I didn't even head to work for some days (also because some painting job in my office). Yet, I was working on some ideas while in the meantime uploading more photos to some new stock sites which, unfortunately, seems not doing any good.

Glossa

I didn't work much on Geltani conlang this week and I doubt I would do much as well because of all these time-consuming "problems". However, I've done some trials to solve one problem that was buzzing my mind for a while, which is the ambiguous formation of words from Arabic into Geltani in which the short vowels are different but the main consonants are the same. Just to give out an example:

laħam [لَحَم]: (he) welded

laħm [لحْم]: meat

luħim [لُحِم]: welded (passive)

In Arabic, there are many examples of this kind. In one of my previous posts I gave out a similar example with the root [M-L-K], which is related to ownership and ruling.

However, since I've been making trials with verbs for some time right now and decided to derive verbs from nouns (mainly because nouns would vary significantly in their consonants), which solves the problem partially, I've decided now to derive nouns of professions and titles in a similar manner as I decided to do with verbs. Thus, The word for king would be derived from the noun kingdom. Just to show:

Kingdom

King

Kingdom: Xiŋwiñz'

King: Xiŋwiñzaji

"X" as "CH" in Loch,  "ŋ" as "ng" in English, "ñ" as a nasalized vowel, and " ' " as a schwa.

Of course this transliteration and vocal system is still not finished but let's call it a demo. I'm not sure if I'm happy with the "-ji" suffix because it sounds too Japanese and I'm trying to put something on the same line but would better sound differently. However, I'm not going to put much thought on this issue for the time being, as if I didn't find another suitable substitute then I'm going to accept it as it is. Notice that I've added a vowel "a" before "-ji" to merge it into the word, this is because "Z" has a schwa and not into a syllable itself. 

I've made up a special character for this characteristic syllable (or maybe I should call it the profession syllable), but a critical question come to my mind amid all of these fuss: what about the Queen?

In Geltani, unlike in Ayvarith, I've tried to strip the gender bases in formulating the words, but as time progresses, I find myself creating words for He and She or words for His and Her. It seems to me that however I try to step away from this issue it just pulls me back in and there is no escape but to create a special grammatical entity based on genders. This said, I might be inventing a special character for the profession in a feminine form (like in Queen), and probably the suffix would be simply "-jin". This is just the beginning but I'm willing to think it through and see if there is something around this problem. Another problem that is already prevalent somehow is the fact that with such method of deriving from nouns, the writing and pronunciation processes might be longer than normal. 

I might be the first to invent nounal verbs instead of verbal nouns? And then, what about adjectives? For the time being, I'm taking adjectives as they are, i.e. transform them directly from Arabic (in masculine form) without referring back to any idea about derivation from verbs or nouns. Might be a bit illogical in the context of the process, but hey, it's a language after all!

Smokes

I've been planning to take some pictures of smokes for a while since the time I've seen this lovely censer among Mom's possessions. It wasn't until last week though that I've finally began to do some experiments with this subject, and I've hardly done it.

Censer I
Tamron 70-300mm @124mm,
f/13, 250^-1sec,
ISO125.

There is a funny story about these images but I'm going to tell that in the next section of this post. When I decided to work with this censer, I've taken around 30 minutes or maybe more just trying to adjust (and search) for everything. It was late at night in the weekend which is the perfect time to work peacefully with no kids at home. In the beginning I had to take several test shots using only my 580EXII speedlite with a correcting gel (to balance the flash color temperature with the tungsten light in the room) affixed with a reflector and a panel for turning the reflector into a softbox - nice stuff from Expoimaging Rogue lighting kit.
I kept some white boards at hand and it proved very critical for some minute details, as I've used it to pour some light on the dark areas (and the dark areas would change with any slight change in the speedlite's orientation). 

Censer X
Tamron 70-300mm @124mm,
f/18, 250^-1sec,
ISO125.

The next hard part was to fix my other speedlite, 430EXII, to light smoke that comes out of the censer. I've used a spotlight setting (with honeycomb grids) to direct the light and make it spread as less as possible to other parts of the censer - but this specific detail was changed several times to see which setting was the best. Burning incense sticks was not successful enough, thus I had to resort to a more robust solution: burning tissues (Kleenex). With burning tissues, I had more smoke and could test my 430EXII and see if it is really working with the smoke. I put two gels on 430EXII just for fun and see the results. However, the result was like a mix of the two colors; naturally!

Censer XV
Tamron 70-300mm @300mm,
f/14, 250^-1sec,
ISO125.

After taking some shots for the whole body of the censer, I've decided to go deeper and get a closer look (since I'm using Tamron 70-300mm already and no need to move the tripod). The final result for the whole experiment was something close to100 shots, but after filtration and picking those special ones, with specific move in the smoke, a total of 21 images are left out. There was some editing in Photoshop as well to enhance the saturation and to darken the background completely, as the background I've used was not completely dark and it did reflect some light (probably from the room's spotlight rather than the speedlites), beside some unexpected additions to the scene that I didn't notice during the shooting session! I wanted to increase the shutter speed beyond 250^-1sec, which requires using High-Speed settings, to kill the ambient light completely (and darken the background even more) but unfortunately because of using the wireless function to control the speedlites I was not able to achieve this. This can be done with a cable or cord only (and some specific wireless controller or radio transfer probably). Such situations make me more eager to get a long soft cable rather than the helix-like cord that I have already (which hardly extends for more than 2 meters, i.e. around 6.6 ft). I made a mistake here though for not creating a sweep as a backdrop and I've simply placed a black board behind the censer, but checking the limits of the space itself, I think creating a sweep was also out of hand.

Jokes in Stocks

I've stated in my previous post that I'm looking forward to upload some of my images into other stock sites and try to increase the exposure. However, I'm quite aware of the fact that I'm not a commercial photographer and I don't deal much with tabletop photography, so far. Thus, my mission in this regard is not an easy one. Stock sites are not like fine art dealers nor like beauty lovers; they want something practical for usage in designs and ads. Nevertheless, some of their methods and ways in sorting out images are still funny to mention. I've realized that I've created a login in some of these websites long time ago and it was just a re-discovery from my side. Probably I know now why I didn't like the idea of uploading to them in the first place.
Dreamstime: In the beginning, they rejected most of my images and accepted only 2 (out of 10 or 20?). Now, I'm back again uploading to them. I've started to upload almost with the beginning of this week (including the 21 images of the censer) and so far, till the time of writing this blog post, no updates about the rejection status. Yes. I'm not that optimistic about accepting these files.

Depositphotos: This website has really good humor. My account was actually a buyer's account and I had to contact them to switch the login to a contributor. To be able to upload you need to fill in the tax form, and then upload 5 images as an examination to be able to upload to the website. All of my five images were rejected BUT hey! my tax form completion was done successfully! You can't imagine how happy I am. One more happy news here is that I can't put images for examination again till the passage of 10 days from the first examination.

123RF: All what I can say here is, stay away from this website. If Depositphotos rejected 5 photos from the examination sample, this website rejected 30 out of 33 images I've submitted, including ALL of the 21 images of the censer. You see, I'm not expecting all of the images of the censer specifically to be good - after all, the reason I've made several shots is to make different shapes of the smoke and also different zoom levels. For example, Canstockphotos did already rejected 11 and accepted 10 out of 21. When I checked closely, I've realized that reviewers on Canstockphotos did accept mainly images of the censer as a whole and rejected images of the censer in close-up. Here with 123RF, the whole set was rejected under the reason of "Poor lighting/Composition". OK, I understand the fact that I'm not a good photographer, but what kind of composition you are expecting for an isolate object in a tabletop photography? Or what kind of light you are expecting when I state in the file description Golden Censer lit partially? If they stated the reason as "Not marketable" I would quite understand that, but poor lighting and/or composition? That just doesn't add up. From some info bits in their website, I think the website is based in Dubai, and that thing specifically made me more optimistic about submitting to them but now, the whole game rules have changed.

FeaturePics: This is one agency that I do have some hopes for. They did reject some of my images and they did accept some others. One thing I don't understand here is the fact that I have to have 10 accepted images to be able to upload via FTP; my favorite method. So far, I didn't upload my censer images set onto this agency because I do prefer FTP for such large quantity of files. One thing I don't like here is the change in my images titles but to be fair, they did explain that already in their uploading tips, as they see poetic titles are not a good way for marketing and makes it hard for search engines to find the image, i.e. such titles would lessen the exposure to the public. They got a point somehow, even though I think in search engines routines it is usually the keywords that play the key role and not the title.

I'm still looking further but I can't get into any stock website I see. Canstockphotos and Mostphotos seem to be my dominant admirers for the time being.

Finale

There remains some experiments to be done yet but I didn't have the time this week, mainly because I need a model, and my model is, usually, my brother. Even though I did some tests and the results were fine so far, but I do need a good background.
I've notified the group about my inability to enroll in Redbull's contest and they expressed their disappointment. What's significant in their response is their reply: our participation is weak and we will disappoint them. When I asked about who was the initiator for such offer, turned out that the group was and Redbull's team didn't come to the group to ask for participation. I've blamed them (gently) for not checking on the preparations and the readiness of the group's members before involving the name of the group in such contest - specially that my own circumstances with my mother are well known and it is natural that I wouldn't have the full capabilities and time. Their response in fact, to some extent, did prove my point that they did have some heavy dependence on my shoulders which I didn't meet.
For the time being, it seems all I can do is concentrate more on tabletop photography and try to find new subjects to photograph with a twist. Probably this will have some marketable value as well. And they say don't carry the globe's load on your shoulders - how that is even possible?

Alexander 2, V5.

One heck of a night and a day, that was yesterday. A headache and a high blood pressure that accompanied me all the way to my bed time. I slept earlier (or let's say tried), but yet kept on waking up. I took one Cataflam pill at the end just to knock me off and sleep for 3 hrs before raising up again to go to work.

Had a chance yesterday to snap a a picture from some junk thrown beside my work place. The image reflects my feelings about those people who glue their butts to their thrones. Despite all what they do, they remain stupid in the eyes of others and behated.



As you see, I called it the King of Chairs. The hard part was to fix the blue chair on top and make it remain there. When I did so (hardly) with some broken metal pieces from other chairs, the wind started to rotate the base. Usually I like such chairs but not in this condition!
The shooting was mainly to experience my ND filters that I've just received. I fixed the ND4 Grey filter and started to shoot, and then removed it and shot again, then I changed the angle and shot again then fixed the filter and shot back. Of course each session was for 3 shots to combine as HDR. At the end, I joined 6 RAW files for the HDR make up. This gives me an idea in fact about studying the relation between the exposure value, time and the ND filter type. I might do this soon to study how the long exposures (bulb mode) photography work with ND filter and what do I need exactly to eliminate the excessive exposures as much as possible in day time photography.
In photoshop,  I opened my HDR and started on fixing some coloring. Personally, I like the first version of the image (which was combined into HDR in Photoshop itself) because of the high contrast between the blue chair and the yellow wall, and also the darkened purple floor. All of these were fixed by adjustment layers in Photoshop before tone-mapping. Unfortunately, after saving the file, and for some reason I don't know, the original EXR file got grey spots all over the image (and seems I've pressed some wrong key with all that headache in my head!). However, I combined the images again and worked on the second version with Photomatix. Of course, the second version of the image MUST go to photoshop for some tiny adjustment with the contrast and sharpening and then small-sizing to hide some artifacts.
That's it for now and I'm still waiting for the reply of Bigstockphotos!
__________

The fierce eyes met with the frowned faces
while Chinchán exchanged the show of power
There was Kákhbár, standing there beside the king
a valour general, mercy has no landing into his heart
His drink was the blood, and his food was the flesh
and his jokes were made of spears cut into the throat
Then with a loud voice from the horizon did it appear
Chinchán shouted from afar at the so called Kákhbár
"We heard of a mass of muscles, and a heart of stone
a man called Kákhbár the hero, and I doubt if it is so"
The glorious Geltán had his blood violently out from him
and shouted back with words that no one understood
He walked alone to the field and everyone was watching
while Chinchán was there waiting for him with pride
Two heavy things were meeting at that time of old age
if not men, then it is free for others to imagine the beyond
Copper and Iron, no difference in color they have now
but similarities they hold in the sound they do when beaten
Strike by strike, they exchanged the power so fiercely
everyone saw the fire coming out from swords and eyes
If it was not for a mistake in the steps of Chinchán
his head wouldn't be a target to be splitted into two
Just then the Geltáns released the shout of ego
and the knees of Caqobians shivered of fear