What The Heck?

What the hell is going on??? This winter is just a puddle of murky water which doesn't move! No activity, just a dormant life and busy busy mind and technically like a paralyzed person who can't reach out for his camera. There are good points however in this time of the year but still I didn't achieve what I was aiming for! I didn't go out to do some photography at night; my favorite time, in my favorite season of the year!
Anyway, in the meantime, I've been busy doing some other work here and there (mostly in front of the monitor here) and specifically working on posts for my Ayvarith conlang on Instagram. It's not only to spread the word about Ayvarith, but it is also for me to revive my memory a bit! Needless to say how much I did forget about the Bulughman and how the Geltani is on hold again after doing a tiny progress few weeks earlier. Also, I've been working on exploring some of the old panoramas, specially those from Ireland in 2010 from Cashel and Cahir in Co. Tipperary. There had been some inspiring results!

Manach ag Damhsa
(the dancing monk)

One of the first trial was the Hore abbey panorama from inside the abbey. I chose this specifically because of the architectural features and specifically the ceiling which had some Gothic-like or Celtic-like design and when stretched out it is more likely a resemblance of St Brigit's cross!
I had a theory before that places with ceilings specifically are more adequate for such twisted panoramas done in Mercator projection; I think Manach ag Damhsa proves this fact. This panorama got a lot of positive feedback and my group displayed it in the group's gallery account on instagram (@bpf_gallery). The pillars here really played a great deal in making a swift-looking movement. Without those pillars it would have been probably a dull twist. I've previously done something similar, a vertical panorama for this specific scene, but it was slender and the sides had to be chopped off.
Anyway, these panoramas were done in the beginning of my journey in photography back then and it wasn't really an easy to ask to "redo" them again. There were some awful mistakes and some "smudges" where something went wrong in the exposure for that particular slide or HDR image in that angle; some were treated, some were not, simply because I didn't know what the HELL was going on there!

Ar an Snámh
(afloat)

For example, in Ar an Snámh the already-stitched panorama had somewhat like a doppelganger! The abbey had virtually some shady building behind as if covered by fog. Looking closely, I've realized these were stitching errors. I don't know how it did happen, but I surely had no time to fix all of that. Thus, I've just stitched it and made a small size out of it for display here. it is a nice effect I believe; gives an impression of fantasy and surrealism. Could be a good option for some panorama maybe (specifically those with open top, or those which got no ceiling). Some panoramas, also, showed that annoying problem of color patches which I still don't quite know what causes it, and apparently I didn't have the time to redo all the HDR merging again and stitching again. Thus, the natural option was to convert to B&W.

Gairdíní Crochtaí
(hanging gardens)

I'm not so attracted to this one; Gairdíní Crochtaí in fact never was in other forms to tell the truth. Probably the best to be is just a flat spherical panorama for this scene. To get rid of those annoying colored spots, I had to convert to B&W (and even then I had problems with tones). It was a great deal of work here trying to show some details and hide some, keep some details dark and lighten some. Some patches or zones in the panorama had a smudging problem which was hard to resolve before stitching and after that, thus again converting to B&W was the solution.

Caisleán Seilide
(snail castle)

Further I went on and completely went out of my mind when I was struggling with Cahir castle. One of the panoramas done there (in the main yard of the castle) had a strange problem which could be related to a misalignment maybe: the edges of the castle itself were glowing as if it was a halo effect. It is not a halo effect as this white line is sharp and not fuzzy or soft like the halo effect. I'm completely blank about this problem. Anyway, the idea for creating Caisleán Seilide was inspired as I was moving around with the coordinate system under the planet projection (as usual) and notice how some parts of the castle are longer than the others. The only thing I regret about this panorama specifically, maybe, is that I tone-mapped it in Photoshop. It did a fine job but probably it was harder to make a drama out of this panorama specifically. All of the above panoramas were merged in HDR slides first using an older version of Photomatix, and I didn't bother to redo the merging again to see if these problems would just disappear.

Back to reality. It seems I'm left now with some of the final images I could be working with from my travel to Ireland in 2014. Mostly floral and I got to say, they are mostly cliché. But there was some promising venture in those.

An Ghrian Gorm
(the blue sun)

Many of these shots did need a work in the focal depth; I had to mimic a shallow depth (using Lens Blur) to the background to isolate the foreground better (since my lens didn't do its job well in the very beginning!). It is a really hard work and a painstaking job, since you have to go around selecting the specific areas only that need to be protected (or blurred) before applying the blurring effect. For this reason I do expect many glitches in the original image despite the fine look when in small size like An Ghrian Gorm above. I see this radiating effect of blue and purple pleasing (despite being oversaturated at times), thus I decided to do another one.

Corcra chun Goirm
(purple to blue)

But the real catch was an architectural detail from Ashford castle (or its periphery to be precise). It began as a play, then developed into a serious venture which I'm trying to do over and over again whenever I get the chance for such play.

Stánóir an Óir
(gold gazer)

I have to say that from far away, Stánóir an Óir does look like a person with closed eyes. It started with a half face of the statue (which was on the top of the tunnel entrance leading to the walled gardens of Ashford castle). I did previous edit such a shot and wanted to do something different here but didn't know what exactly. Suddenly the whole "vision" started when I played around with the contrast if I remember correctly; then I thought this is a good chance to concentrate the light in specific areas and darken the rest to make a dramatic look. So it was, and the rest was a Photoshop game. Originally, Stánóir an Óir is just a half face, but then it was duplicated and the duplicate is flipped horizontally and attached to the rest to make for a complete face! Then there was a nose and lips job (yes like in cosmetics) to enhance the look a bit. The awkward point here is that the nose is actually somewhat out of focus but probably not that obvious after all. I had to do sharpening twice or thrice to increase the visual impact, while the golden patches were simply a result of adjusting the white balance in RAW before opening in Photoshop. Thus, a dull white statue was transformed dramatically, first by RAW editing, then by Photoshop. I'm looking now for more instances of this sort to work out my mind about it a bit. I think it is a good chance to vent creativity a bit instead of this dull winter season I'm having.

Finale

Things are going slow and sluggish, and I'm trying my best to enjoy my time as much as possible throwing back all the hardships. I'm trying to synthesize a feeling of carelessness deep within me, specially when it comes to conditions at work.
We had a meeting lately and I had to participate and the end result is a bit perplexing. According to one of the members of the committee that manages my workplace said that I did a pretty good job and I should participate more in such meetings when they are due (usually I'm not part of it). This is a good thing because it is encouraging and, well, someone expresses how valuable I am, but on the other hand there is a gloom lurking, as it means more responsibility and a careful venturing in that domain, in a time when all I'm thinking of is myself and my leisure, and doing what I like to do.

Source: Amazon

I'm in the process of reading an interesting book here, which I've brought with me from Dublin's airport, but didn't start reading it except of late. The book is by Daniel Kahneman, and as it says on the cover, Kahneman is a Nobel laureate. Kahneman is a psychologist and discusses many (logical) psychological issues, specially those affecting the general public. I had some ideas specifically about the media, and this man here, a professor, did explain exactly what I perceived in the media under his term: Availability Cascade. I advice everyone reading this now to get this book. Ironically as the title says, Thinking Fast and Slow, I do find myself reading it slowly; probably mainly because the language is English with long passages and entwined terminology, but after all English is not my first language - I guess I should learn fast-reading in English. Saying that, I'm doing some effort as well in learning Irish, at least in writing it for the time being!
I've been running errands in a continuous rhythm by now, every single day. Makes me think of a real vacation as well of doing nothing but sleep and walk somewhere nice. Alas, my duties are always calling for me…

Galore…

Again, I'll try to wrap this quick. I'm seriously suffering this winter, with lack of enough sleep and the tiresome body, along with some weather conditions; I don't mind the coldness, but there were few rains here and there and the situation was not encouraging to explore the beach at night as I usually do.
Thus, not much was going on this week except for my usual work with shots and specifically panoramas from Ireland trying to do more experimenting with various touches and projection styles. Meanwhile, I devised a plan to invest my time in doing various things at work (since no real work is running). Thus, I dedicate some time to typing an article, and then to read some Irish grammar lessons as much as I can or reading a book, and finally spending the last hour at work watching some cartoons. I know, fancy workplace you might be saying right now but no, it's not. It's filled with stupidity to the neck and what I'm doing is just my methodology to payback and vent. As a rule: I don't respect those who don't respect me.

Now back to the images, and specifically panoramas. I'm trying to keep on the schedule with doing one single image a day, and one panorama day (both from Ireland's collection of 2014). Panoramas specifically had been a target for my "extreme Mercator" methods which I've mentioned in my previous post. There were some interesting results, specially after the help of Mr Photoshop in doing a bit of effects.

An Ais
(the axis)

One of the panoramas, An Ais, was easily shaped into a twirling surreal environment; probably what really helped here is the semi-conic structure of the tower inside. My hardships here, though, were the color adjustments and balancing (it had a greenish shade mixed with yellow).
There is a lot of empty space in An Ais and I was going to crop that down and make a square, but some features would be cropped as well and there was a great chance that it might look unbalanced more. Anyway, I had to exaggerate just a little bit in the twirl at center by using the wrap command in Photoshop and twirling the central points a bit. All that was done in HDR mode before tone-mapping. However, it wasn't always as easy and simple as that.

Gaoth agus Gaoithe
(wind and winds)

Some other panoramas like Gaoth agus Gaoithe were large, and definitely a simple wrap wouldn't work. Thus, the only solution available was to use the Twirl command under Filters menu. However, this command was not available for 32-bit (HDR) mode, nor 16-bit mode. It was all rolled back to good ol' 8-bit. Most of the adjustments were done in 16-bit mode of course, but to do the twirl command, I had to move back to 8-bit mode (which I will use anyway to save it as JPEG). This panorama in particular gained some popularity in 500px and the count went down after a day or so; I will never understand how this website works. Yet, the more difficult panorama was yet to come.

Is é ag titim Ashford
(Ashford is falling)

Along with the extreme Mercator trend lately, I've started also an off-the-center trend, mainly dedicated to tunnel view panoramas and planets. It is an approach to give a more dramatic look to the otherwise dull planets or tunnels, specially if there is no strong symmetry involved. In this panorama particularly, Is é ag titim Ashford, I wanted to add something extra other than just tilting the globe to the corner. Suddenly the idea of moving the clouds occurred to me. The perfect command for this was the Radial Blur, which can mimic an effect of zooming into (and thus adding some depth). The Motion Blur might be capable of that too but here, this command moves the pixels horizontal only without any "focal" point to direct the lines of pixels to. According to Christian Bloch (Blochi), the author of the HDR Handbook, such blurs are more beneficial if they were to be done in HDR format, because in HDR mode you don't control the pixels only, but also the luminance data accompanying them!

Source: Amazon

Well, the challenge here is how to do it? The square panorama after some tilting and cropping, was a bit more than 9000x9000 pixels! Selecting the sky portion was a bit lengthy work to do but it was done with some considerable effort and "eating" around some edges. Even with selecting a portion of the image (almost half of it), Photoshop machine couldn't apply the effect because of RAMs problem. Solution? Switch to the 64-bit Photoshop version. It has access to more RAM space to do the job. The only awkward thing about it is, no plugins are installed to be used for this version. Thus, I had to run this version JUST to do a radial blur! A radial blur of degree 5, took around few minutes to be done here.Saved the file (as PSB) and then back to the 32-bit version and the work was done the usual way; tone-mapping, enhancing, reduction!

Now, I've officially made another Instagram account for my Ayvarith (@ayvarith) and I'm posting a picture per day so far. I'm starting with the alphabet for the time being. Probably later I will get deeper with themes like "word of the day" or some grammatical issues? Who knows! The cumbersome point here is trying to log-in and out of my 2 accounts and posting here and there (and then re-posting from one into the other).

This is it for now and I wish if I can handle this weekend properly and do further out-goings at night. I just need to think of a proper location. Not counting on my luck here…

Lazy…

OK I admit; I have been lazy in the past week. Well, 2 weeks. That's why no post last week. The temperatures here dropped suddenly with a chilling wind on and off. Truly a bone breaker. Not sure why, but I've been feeling tired and lazy lately to even go out at night in such weather which I like the most. Probably it is the erratic sleeping pattern (which persists even in working days). For this reason, I've been mostly editing and creating new panoramas, besides trying a bit of the new "observations" in the field of panoramas to some of the older panoramas. Moreover, there is one extra observation on the way as well!

An-Mór

I never thought of myself being so interested in such projection style which seemed so boring before like Mercator. The beginning with this projection was (as mentioned in previous posts) was to make a more plausible vertical panoramas because vertical panoramas are "slim" and cropping the sides would do more harm. Mercator was a solution because the vertical perception comes almost in a square ratio (height = width), and occasionally the sidelines make a nice curvature with no need to crop even! However, time had to come to push my views further with an extreme approach.

Ashford Domhanda
(global Ashford)

The beginning was about doing a vertical panorama (again) for Ashford castle in Co. Mayo, but with a twist or a swirl as it was with other panoramas recently. However, this approach didn't work out and I decided to play with the sliders a bit. All to be done was to stretch the viewing window or space to the extreme ends to show the full extent of the Mercator projection rather than compressing it, and the result as you can see in Ashford Domhanda; a global look like those maps which are also made using Mercator projection.

Casadh an tSúgáin
(twisting of the rope)
I was seeking a swirl like this
for Ashford castle panorama.

My personal impression about the implications of such projection style is that it gives sense of grandness, totality, greatness; probably these impression come from the back of my head as I used to see lot of Mercator maps (specially in school times). However, this projection style has one awkward disadvantage, even though a normal result: the stretched and blurred sides and corners. My intentions were to crop these portions out in the beginning, but that would corrupt the overall oval shape of the center, which is to be the main interest. For the time being, I would just call this style as Extreme Mercator. I'm still working on discovering the possibilities here, and specially with old panoramas.
When it comes to old panoramas, I made a trial to do the "twisting" effect again with one of the places I like and taken a panorama from back in 2013: The Arab Organizations Headquarter. Such a place with quite amazing wooden craft and Arabesque and Islamic designs. Anyway, it seems a twist here is not quite that attractive, for various reasons...

El Andaluz Bailando
(the dancing Andalusian)

Generally speaking, the hall is a mess. Despite the fact that it was wide and bears not many obstacles in view, yet it had many reflections, and twisting the panorama that way as in El Andaluz Bailando made some eyes "sore". I sort of came out with a conclusion that to do a twist, the roof of the place must be close and it is better to have the surroundings on the ground arranged in some systematic manner. In the case of El Andaluz Bailando, the roof was too high, and the surroundings on the ground were not giving out a sense of symmetry.

An Solas Sníomhta
(the twisted light)
The twisting effect appears stronger
and more concrete when the roof is at proximity

However, the work was not limited to Mercator, despite being big part of my work lately. The old tunnel projection (the reverse of the planet projection) was a target for some "surreal" editing. It is a surreal projection after all, but I mean here something out of the usual look for such projections. Something off-center.

An Cúinne Geal
(the bright corner)

Frankly, I was aiming at a sweeping movement for the landscape and the house and decided to make the tunnel projection as a starting point. However, things went out of hand a "bit". Why would I restrain myself for centralizing such panoramas anyway? Specially those which do no possess any degree of symmetry anyway! Call me an impressionist, but those curves can do a lot further when moves off the center; Curves = Emotions.
The main problem here is the cropping factor. No, not the sensor's crop factor. Here, the original panorama was 9000x9000 pixels in size (meaning a resolution of 81MP!). However, after some crops to adjust the portions of the panorama and the curves of lines (controlling those with coordinates is hard), the size came down to around 5000x5000 pixels (i.e. 25MP). Such a loss of size. Of course, I can stitch it again with a larger size to crop it back again, but that means more processing power. Imagine this: for a panorama coming down from 81MP to 25MP with such crop, then that means only 30% of the original size is used. If I'm going to do this on the usual size of 8000x8000 (64MP) like most squared panoramas before, then I would need to stitch to somewhere around 213MP in resolution, that would be somewhat around 14500x14500 pixels; this is just to crop it down to the size of 64MP.
Anyway, this is just the beginning, in hope that I would do more observations about this. One of my goals right now is to create something else with panoramas, specifically in a vertical format, but no success so far. All I can say about it right now is, it would be a diagonal panorama!

Geltani Again!

I know, I've been neglecting this project for a really long time and I've totally forgot about doing some representation for Omniglot.com as well.  However, I was working slowly for some time with this project before traveling to Ireland last October and I think I didn't post anything about these "inventions" and additions.
For a beginning, I tried to make a standard set for the "radicals"; those large strokes that contain other glyphs combinations. Usually those radicals are the last letter of the word. I wouldn't say it is a final set, but it is a trial to make it so.

A scan for some of the radicals designed already (from my Geltani notebook). Sorry for the bad quality here; I did barely make it through the technical problems! The asterisk here points to the position of the other glyphs relative to the general (larger) radical glyph.

On the other hand, there had been some tiny approaches to imagine out a general aspect for the grammar, and this was by some trials to form the passives, conditionals and perfectives. Not planning to complicate things here, so the general formula for such phrases would consist of a mix of the verb "to be" in a specific tense, with the original tense marker of the verb itself. This is the idea for now and seems it works (logically!).

Another scan for some grammatical constructions with the verb "to fly" which transliterate as "píj" (pron: peej, with "j" as in "jacket").
The top 2 columns of 4 lines discuss the direct tense (flew, fly, will fly, fly!) on the right column, and the passive form (was flown, be flown, will be flown) plus the modal (should fly) on the left column.
Next line is an example: would have flown, which literally here becomes (fly-will be-was)
Next example: he should have flown, literally here becomes (must-fly be-is)
Last example: would have flown (to...), which literally becomes (... to fly-was be-was)
As seen here in general, it is combination of two tenses of the main verb and the verb "to be"

Beside these forms, it seems that it would be necessary to merge some phonemes or sounds in Geltani when they come successively, like the sounds of "J" (as in Jacket) and "Ch" (as in Church), but I'm not sure yet of this theory right now. I hate to deal with a language like mathematics - this is not the way I learned English (even though it's not perfect anyway!), but it is important to "live" the language and make sense of it. Just get into the flow and only then things would fit into place, and this is what I'm trying to apply myself as I'm going through some Irish lessons online (sadly written and no audio available).
It is funny though how I got into formulating the grammar without even working on representing my work and the script. I've been overwhelmed with many things to do at the spur of the moment which effectively made my mind scattered in all directions.

Finale

Snufkin

The Moomins

Well, I won't be ashamed to say that one of the reasons to be lazy in the past week and this week is the fact that I was busy playing games, and watching cartoons. Old cartoons that is, like The Moomins. Well, I remember this cartoon long time ago (and played in Arabic back then of course and I'm watching this version specifically) and I used to get scared somehow every time it is played because it, simply, looked weird. However, now it gives another feelings when I watch it, specially after knowing that originally this Finnish comic and stories were dedicated to adults with some deep meanings. To me it resembles the simplicity and the life of adventure in simple terms, needless to say the imaginative stories and the countryside framework which fits my mood perfectly. I think my favorite character here is Snufkin. This is the English name of course. I like his role and I think it does have some aspects that I need, crave, or already have. This is not the only cartoon on the list; Golden Cities (or as dubbed in Arabic: Golden Dreams) is next on the queue line. However, I might not start it immediately after The Moomins. I need some time in between to reschedule my priorities!

On the other hand, I've been thinking seriously on having another instagram account for Ayvarith to post some aspects about it since there is no homepage for it yet. Another failure, I know. I have to admit, I do hate building websites! However, this will also mean added pressure, and with the technical problems I do have already with connecting to instagram and posting in it, it is probably better to wait and watch out for the next move. I'm so pressed in time with my photo-processing schemes and duties for the group, as well as my usual daily posts on instagram. In all of this, I'm giving my workplace my back, which I know it does sound dangerous a bit but I can't force myself to respect something that doesn't respect me back.

As I'm typing this, I've received an email informing me that one of my images submitted to HIPA (Hamdan International Photography Award) was qualified after the first round. The image was submitted for the Night Photography category. Meanwhile, my other images for other categories did not pass. The image submitted was Die Kuwaitische Mitternacht, but I had to translate the name into English as per the rules. It is funny that I've submitted my images in a haste just 2 days before the deadline. There was another event I wanted to role into, and also takes place in the UAE, which was an award for achievements done for the Arabic language. My aim was to submit my blog, but I had to back off. I think my blog is relatively new beside the fact that I was not sure of the regulations about electronic contents in that way. I had to let it go for now as I have more important issues to attend to (and ironically one of them is find a topic for my next article for my Arabic blog!).

Die Kuwaitische Mitternacht

Laziness in the meantime comes as an essential part of my life now. I feel that I need it strongly. I just realized that even when I play a game, it comes to me as a "duty" to do and not merely an entertainment to have. I think I've completely lost the definition of "entertainment" in my life…

Hektisch II…

I'll try to wrap this quick. Well, happy new year first, and wish you all who read this (ONLY THOSE READING THIS!), ahem, a creative new year. A year that washes whatever pains that were there in 2014.
Currently, I've been celebrating my own triumph against one of the hardest panoramas that ruined my appetite for panoramas for some time, but now the appetite is all back of course! However, there remains the part where I MUST do the fixes for these newly generated panoramas, including the HDR tone-mapping which proved to be tricky - and we end the show with noise cleaning which proved to be an arduous task.

Casadh an tSúgáin
(twisting of the rope)

In fact, Casadh an tSúgáin is an Irish song title which I was listening to as I was doing the processing for this image, and seems it fits exactly the image's geometry! When I explored the variety of projections I've totally forgot about the usual flat panorama as it looked very regular and mundane. Hence, I've continued to explore the other styles. However, in Casadh an tSúgáin tone-mapping was troublesome and consequently it made for a hard time with the noise cleaning later. The leader of the photography group liked the small version of this panorama, and asked me to include it in the next set of images to be sorted out for future uses by the group (a usual procedure); however, I'm not sure how would the large version sustain the critique with such noise and spots that would need another round of cleaning. In this projection, I've noticed how the close pillars (to my left and right on location) could have formed a straight line. Originally this panorama was 90^o counterclockwise but I decided to put it as seen above making the symmetry line horizontal and adjacent to the major pillars - while keeping the corridor up and down to form some sense of ground at least, specially with some of the buildings.

Herculis Cuniculum
(tunnel of Hercules)

Next on the list was the tunnel projection, Herculis Cuniculum. This one had even harder work done to it and yet it is suffering still, in the original large version at least. The main problem here was to cropping and distort to ensure some degree of symmetry. Anyway, it seems I did achieve some degree of symmetry along the central vertical axis but not the horizontal one unfortunately; and this is what you get when you screw things up on location with symmetry and centralizing the tripod in the middle of location! The noise level here was significant but not troublesome as much as it was in the previous projection with Casadh an tSúgáin, which is something I don't understand so far, but probably it is related to the degree of distortion that each projection bears. The main nuisance in this panorama specifically comes from the night sky and the buildings of the city; those are the main sources for the high noise level.

Planeta Laternis
(planet of lanterns)

At the end we have the typical planet projection, Planeta Laternis. Originally, this panorama was 90^o clockwise. However, it did seem to be more balanced with keeping the buildings of the city up, while the corridor would spread left and right. Anyway, the rotation process was done later, after all the fixes and the trials to "gain the symmetry" back with a lot of distorting processes. Since I didn't shoot the nadir, I had to fill the space of that block with a solid color and seems it fits perfectly (after adjusting the hue and saturation to match its surrounding tiles). All of these adjustments of course were in HDR mode and before tone-mapping, but the hardest part was to distort such a large file in HDR mode and make it fit specific proportions and perfectly centered. For this reason I mostly do large stitches because I know I will crop them a lot later on, and the good thing about Planeta Laternis is that the edges (where the roof of the corridor itself lies in this projection) contains not many interesting details beside some stitching errors; Thus, cropping this area out was a big relief and a solution which shortened the processing time significantly.

How my Photoshop looks when working with these panoramas.
Notice the guidelines all over the place to ensure a symmetrical distortion and cropping.
click to enlarge

Finale

One year is over now and a new one coming even though I don't care much about it. After all, generally speaking, I'm not supposed to celebrate it! However, I do wish all readers a happy new year with all the best wishes to be fulfilled within.
My plans for now is to use the winter to my advantage as much as possible and go out at night often. I know when summer comes, it's all but a dead season. I just hope my body would cope a bit further with this, specially with the hectic life style and responsibilities thrown on my way.
As for my plans for the new coming year, all what I want for the time being is, to be more careless actually, and have further fun. Lot of fun…

Mercator II…

Well, here we are with another week. Another "idle" week if I can call it so. Many of the plans that I've stepped up didn't progress as... well, as planned! It's a continuous trend since last week (hence no post for last week) and when I tried to break the humdrum of this routine I was simply knocked back to block one. Two main projects here failed to take progress: the long exposure portraiture and one night-time panorama. But I have to say I had my trials at least which didn't work out, and specifically for that night-time panorama, during which the lights were turned off as I was working! Talk about being pissed off about your luck, as ever.

The Waterfront panorama print taken with my brother's iPhone.

On the other hand, I've at least accomplished something, with the printing and varnishing, and then sending off my gift to the owners of the Waterfront (B&B). I'm just hoping the address is correct since it was hard to get a concrete address for the place; It was mostly instructional text for the directions to reach the place (from Galway city or some other places). With this, I'm sort of still trying to find and explore the "world" of varnishes here (as we lack proper inkjet varnishes).

Routinely

Since the majority of projects with the camera are put to an end for the past 2 weeks, I've spent the time available for me with my arsenal of photos and panoramas from my last visit to Ireland, trying to extract as much as possible and specifically doing more projections of panoramas that were done and stitched already. At this point, saving the project file (which usually I didn't care of much) proved to be a superb advancement; as it serves as a quick starting point for other projections, and later saving the project anew can be helpful for future work when needed. Projection files in PTGui don't take much space (few KBs only); they consist mainly of general data strings about the panorama and its elements.

Go dTí an Caisleán (to the castle)
EF-S18-55mm @30mm, f/8, 200^-1sec, ISO200.

An Fhianaise (The Witness)
Sigma 70-300mm @300mm,
f/8, 30^-1sec, ISO200.

Another reason for working up more with these photos (panoramas and regulars) is the fact that I'm working on my Arabic blog to describe my travels in Ireland this year, for which I do require some photos of the places; both artistic (as in An Fhianaise) and documentary (as in Go dTí an Caisleán). This pushed me further to spend more time with digging the folders and not think much about the artistic values of the photos (for the time being), but merely use them in descriptive terms. However, I'm trying to do my best with those images even if they are just for documentation purposes (e.g. Go dTí an Caisleán been through a series of edits to enhance the clouds and the grass, and make it sharp).
On the other hand, there is also the on-going work with panoramas, as I'm trying to prepare my arsenal of those for the coming event of an expo with the group (in which I was enrolled alone in 2012 and with the group in 2013). Meanwhile, I'm increasing my experiments with Mercator projection for vertical panoramas, for all the flexibilities it gives! Despite some commentary on some aspect of such approach by some observers but I'm somewhat giving a deaf ear to that...

Déthaobh (double surface)

I think I've posted Déthaobh in my previous post under a different name; anyway, I'm trying to enhance my knowledge with Irish here. However, someone commented on this as follows:

• This is an edit. The image shouldn't (supposedly) be touched.
• The "road" in the middle is taking the bulk of the image.

Well, I'm not going to explain the first point. I think it is related to the old debate of how much a photographer is supposed to use Photoshop in his work, beside the fact that this image is not a work of Photoshop, but it was used merely to enhance it and not to make it. Let's move to the second point here: the road (or asphalt) is taking the bulk from the image.
At some point, even though the one who announced such comments is unaware of the processes behind the make of such panoramas, yet such comment did bring my attention to a significant point: Location type plays a significant role. Here, probably, I didn't have much say in the formation of this panorama in this way, as the asphalt is already there, and I was not planning to let the house appear in the middle and split the asphalt into two halves; because this was not the main idea I was working after. However, it is a point worthy of some consideration when it comes to the nature of the place to be placed under such projection.

An Gotach Sníomhach
(the spinning Gothic)

Céimseata Meánaoiseach
(medieval geometry)

On the other hand, I personally do see the benefits of a vertical Mercator projection in other panoramas, like An Gotach Sníomhach for example. Here, we see the line of trees curving smoothly along the sides and not so stretched. I did not even think of cropping from the sides (only from the top and bottom after skewing the image to level the church). Probably, at this point, I would have faced the same situation as in Déthaobh with the asphalt that leads to the the church itself. The same goes with Céimseata Meánaoiseach, but in this case I've cropped the ground completely, making the panorama ground-less almost. I have to re-check some of these panoramas again and again to see what possibilities do the ground (or nadir) point provide of details before doing such projection. If things would end up like Déthaobh, then it would probably be better to simply do a normal spherical vertical panorama! That would let things be slender and thin with stretched sides that would need a crop mostly. This is not only for the current set of panoramas from Ireland; but I'm trying the trend for some other older panoramas as well.

Marijuana Galore!

What I really like about this projection is, not only it gives a new meaning to a vertical panorama, but it also tends to (almost) fit the panorama into the usual square dimension usually seen in planet and some other polar-type panoramas.

Finale

An Teach ag Deatach
(the smoking house)

Well, this is it for now, but I'm going to pray to finish what I'm planning for in this weekend! I won't rant about work just now since I'm getting sicker of it and it is a known fact by now I believe - but I'm seriously thinking of leaving it at some point and try to do something else. In the meantime I'm trying to roll back to poetry as I feel something is missing out in my life; like I do some way to drain what's inside. Needless to say, getting back to my other projects that were put on hold for a long time even before I get into the vacation mood.
Say, how was that feeling again, when someone is supposedly passionate?...

Mercator…

Back to normal (and moderate) life again now after the Expo has finished. It's time now to shuffle my cards again and try to do some stuff that I've been postponing for a while. However, this is not the end of the story with Expos, as we are planning to get enrolled again in another Expo hopefully in March. I do have my own plans for this "show" with the group, but of course I have to discuss matters with them.

Failure No. 1

For some time I had this idea of doing some "portrait" shot with infrared. Yes, portrait. Not my cuppa tea I know, but this time it is combined with infrared, which means long exposure. I've seen some artist which use property for creating a soft touch for portraits, and I thought of experimenting with that as well, even though I don't remember if they did use infrared filters or just a regular long exposure. Anyway, since I have no model to bear with me, I had to do it all on my own.
I made up a simple setting for experimenting with this concept and I made sure that I can rest my head somewhere so it won't move much, but only little shakes (normal body movement). The idea was a table with stack of books (just an addition) and resting my chin on the table (while sitting on the ground). Focusing and directing the camera wasn't a problem, but the problem was majorly the VERY long exposure with ISO100. It required about 65 minutes! I wasn't sure I could rest my head that long! Thus, I tried to use ISO400 instead for a total exposure of about 16 minutes. Boy, did I not sleep while waiting for the exposure to finish!
Unfortunately for me, the final image was pretty much noisy and almost impossible to clean, as well as not being soft much. For this trial, I used the B+W 092 infrared circular filter with my Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 lens. However, I've began to understand IR filters further and one factor that this circular filter does not yield more interesting results is the fact that its cut-off wavelength point (the point after which waves are allowed to pass) is somewhere around 650nm. On the other hand, the KODAK IR gel filter which I use with my Canon EF 15mm fisheye lens usually, has a cut-off point of something around 900nm. This means that the circular filter from B+W does allow more amount of "visible" light to pass and hence the results aren't interesting as much as those results obtained by the gel filter from KODAK, which filters off more visible light. Of course, in the case of the gel filter, the exposure will be even longer!
The next step now is to try regular long exposures with the help of ND filters only, and probably using IR filters later, but with the help of some extra light source to light the scene (my face) further and help on shortening the exposure as well as "producing" more IR in the scene; I heard tungsten bulbs do produce a fair amount of IR.

Twisted and Vertical

My work is continuing with panoramas taken from Ireland, and this time adding to it some of the old panoramas from other places as well since the occasion of the Annual Book Fair last week. My attitude was a mixture of presenting panoramas and single shots when any process of sorting is scheduled by the group as I don't want to confine myself to a specific category. However, it turned out that panoramas from my side can play the "winning" card in many aspects - and for this reason I've developed some ideas for the next group's activity but they need to be discussed first. Anyway, this is not the matter to discuss here for now!

Talamh na Neamh
(Heaven's ground)

I've been working on doing more vertical panoramas lately, as I've figured that it was the lesser projection in my collection of panoramas, probably because of the lack of straight or longitudinal features in many of the scenes that I usually shoot for panoramas. Anyway, I thought maybe I should try to discover the possibilities in variety of places even those with no distinctive straight features (roads, corridors, ..etc).
However, one of the major problems in such projection is the quite stretched sides of such vertical panoramas which require a crop most of the time because they bear no distinctive or legible features. This is somewhat a minus point for this projection because the cropping limit can be hard to find, and the vertical panorama can be way too thin. But seems there is a promising solution to this in the atmosphere. Mercator.

Táim Suas ag Dul
(I'm going up)

Dhá-Taoibh
(double surface)

It never occurred to me to use Mercator projection, needless to say in a vertical format! I have to say here things came in as a coincidence. The Mercator projection is usually looked up as, simply, an elongated form of the cylindrical projection. However, when it comes to vertical panoramas, the difference is clear. With Mercator, the vertical panorama appears wide in the middle area (like a bulge outwards) and this gives for nicer views and more details. Cylindrical on the other hand, renders this area small and far. Probably vertical panoramas like Talamh na Neamh and Táim Suas ag Dul are more elongated (they are vertical panoramas from regular spherical flat panoramas), and the geometry of the place did help here as well in achieving quite the view without such a bulge. However, panoramas like Dhá-Taoibh had not many interesting features in the regular spherical panorama in vertical format. Mercator was more interesting here, despite the problem in the middle area of the panorama because of the distribution of the grass in the scene, which is a problem already in the spherical vertical panorama; because it renders the place unbalanced in this dimension. With this notice, I'm adding one more creative brush to my palette for the future rendering of more panoramas, and probably solve problems with some panoramas!

Finale

I'm here. Sweeping through life like a pinball game right now from side to side wondering what I really want. I'm planning to increase my activity within the group, thinking that it might give my life a further meaning with all the collapsible dreams that I've been watching fall down so far. I've been told once that things would look and turn for the better after 30; I wonder where from did they get this?.
In the meantime I'm giving work and home my back (almost) and all what I'm going to do is just work on my own projects, my own photos, and on my reputation as a panorama-maker. Say, what do they call a person who makes panoramas? Panoramer?
I leave you know with this musical which I fell in love with. Gentle as it may be, violent on my heart it is. Simply the work of a band of geniuses: The Chieftains...

Cephalargia...

If it wasn't for the frequent headache that have been striking me now and then from the beginning of this week, this week should have been fair deal with me. I've started this week with a severe headache (or migraine, call it whatever you like) that almost kept me paralyzed, but even with that I went to work on Sunday (weekend: Friday, Saturday), and didn't feel like going to work on Monday. This break from work in fact allowed me to do many things (since I've been awake in the morning). I think now, I do need a vacation just to do my own business!

I've started now recording the 6th chapter of Alexander's story, and in hope that the engine won't stop. In average, I'm planning to vocalize 4 verses a day, if possible. The break I had on Monday made me do lot of things, including the recordings, and also some images and panorama preparations from my session on Saturday (will discuss below).
The vocalization is now available for verses starting from 121 to 432, here. Of course you can always refer to the English version here, in the same website.

I. Scientific Center Workflow:

On Saturday, I had to push myself out of bed and head to the Scientific Center; a plan that I've been delaying for about a month or so. This trial now is different, specially with my 2 relatively new lenses compared to the last time I've taken pictures from there (April, 2011). After some negotiations with the receptionists I was able to get in. The difference here, beside the lenses, I went in with my VT-head and tripod. Heavy sum of tools that I had to carry through the corridors, and actually beside the panoramas and few simple shots with the macro lens, I don't think I needed the tripod after all.
One of the mistakes that I've made here is to bring the ball-head for the tripod instead of the pan-head. Despite the theoretically-easy movement of the ball-head, its lock system and fine-tuning for the shots proved to be a failure. I guess I will always stick to my old pan-head; it is easier to control.

Velbon pan-head (owned)
Source: B&H

Inside the aquarium, I've been mostly using my new macro lens (100mm) which works well as a telephoto lens as well. There were few instances where I would have changed the lenses for some particular locations, but the main lens was the 100mm.
The new lens has f/2.8 which theoretically works better in the darkness rather than lenses of f/5.6 and f/3.5 (that is, the maximum aperture). However, that did not avoid me from using high ISO ranging from 800 to 1600 at some instances. In fact even at ISO1600, there were problems following some movements and most of the images were blurred, which is normal in my case.

At some points, certain points, I've used my 15mm fisheye lens, to take panoramas of course. The panoramas were hard to take, and at a certain point I had to wait for 45 minutes just to shoot a simple 360 panorama. At the end, and with my last supposed panorama, I had to stop in the middle of the process after the arrival of some people, who eventually did not have any intentions to budge. Some panoramas, like the last one, was done in single shots in order to finish as soon as possible.

Aquacurvatic
Rokinon 8mm fisheye f/3.5 t/15 ISO1600

 One of the earliest shots to be processed was the shot taken between water tanks at the end of the aquarium almost. The play of light was enough to catch my eyes, but I had to wait for a significant time just to get this shot done (I think 15 minutes). I've taken this shot in portrait and landscape orientations but at home, I've realized that the landscape orientation fits better for showing more curving, and also for the planned DxO corrections. Starting from this image in fact, I've made up my mind for a new approach and a new workflow, specially when it comes to pictures taken with high ISOs.

Pengo
Canon 100mm f/2.8 t/160 ISO800

This approach involves using DxO first as the main RAW editing tool, followed up by using ACR for final touches. I realized that I might do better if I reduce the noise levels gradually. First by DxO (beside editing other aspects like contrast and saturation), which has ready-made profiles for a wide range of lenses and helps with reducing the luminance and chromatic noise significantly. Starting from this point of automatic correction (if available) I would reduce the amount of correction leaving some noise left in the image still. Finalizing the edit, the file would be saved as DNG (Digital Negative).

Fish Profile
Canon 100mm f/2.8 t/25 ISO1600

ACR has some advantages over DxO, as I believe. On one side it has easier controls, and it has direct editing tools on the other hand. DxO is complex and good, but sometimes you need simple touches like fill light to just add the right amount of light in the shadows; something you can struggle with somehow with DxO. Also, in ACR editing, the color space can be assigned directly, while in DxO it involves loading profile files and save it to the file. For this reason, I never assigned color space while working in DxO, but only when I open the DNG file in ACR.
The workflow continues with reducing the luminance and chromatic noise a bit further in ACR too. The sharpness amount is not touched though. Finally, a final noise reduction is achieved using NeatImage or Noise Ninja. Noise Ninja is preferred though since it can make a profile from different spots in the image and also the sharpness can be controlled easier than in NeatImage.
This lengthy workflow might not be practical in sense of speed but it did yield some good results I think. Also, it cannot be done for HDR processing. Aquacurvatic itself was originally captured in brackets for some HDR processing but I realized one of the slides was enough to achieve the desired look.

II. Too Cool?

Ever had an image, that after the first step of processing, you just find out that the image is so good that you just don't know what to do about it or how to process it because of the many possibilities and the racing ideas in your mind?
At least I know this is what was happening with me when I reviewed and tried to correct an image of a horned viper from the Scientific Center. The image was taken with Fluorescent WB (and mounted on tripod). Turns out that the image came out bright and not as contrasty as I hoped. With simple correction to the WB, the image became another story and I've realized its potential for different settings. However, I limited my editing to two versions only.

Tarnung (disguise)
Canon 100mm f/22 1.6sec ISO400

Tarnung - BW

The black and white version specifically was delicate to achieve, with many contrast and level adjustment layers to achieve the look. I thought of adding a tint of light blue to reflect a silver-ish look, but that would be even another path, another story.

III. Pano Pano:

As I've stated before, I took the chance inside the Scientific Center to take some panoramas. Not all of them are good I have to admit, since lot of visitors were there and in some places I had to work as fast as I can, but I did have some peace in one particular location despite the visitors: The Greenhouse; as I call it. It is the place where the penguins are and some birds are left to fly freely beside fish tanks and snakes, and some green cover. It looks indeed like some tropical forest, but with controlled air circulation!

Greenhouse #3

When stitching this panorama, I've tried to get out of the conventional box of certain ideas, like doing a vertical panorama using a flat spherical projection. Instead, I've tried the Mercator projection and converted the image into a vertical upside down panorama.
The main reason for this is that the empty space in the middle (or the ground where I stood) pushed all the interesting features on the side and a flat spherical panorama done vertically won't give much attention to such details (while stretching this space in the middle and make it look like an ellipsoid). Tone-mapping, on the other hand, was done in a simple form and not depicting any dramatic emotions, but I've tried to convey a natural feeling to it as much as possible (by using the Compressor option in Photomatix instead of the DetailEnhancer).
I've stitched this panorama 4 times, each time in a different projection style. I'm planning to present my work to the people responsible for the gift shop inside the center, in hope that I might get a deal out of such images if possible. As for now, I have to prepare all my papers and pictures before calling the main principle.

I've made simple stitches for other simple panoramas but did not proceed with processing. Some of them would be hard to represent, specially those captured in single shots and not in HDR. Yet, there is at least one panorama that is not touched yet at the time this post is written.

IV. Trends of Business:

Till this very moment I didn't hear anything from the Marina Mall desk which was supposed to call me back (after an optimistic conversation). However, and because I've been busy with other tasks, I didn't try to recall and check again.
The latest for me now is that I've been trying to make a layout design for a request paper that includes some prices for some services. Still not finalized, but the major aspect of it are set. I think I do need some help in creating this form (and also a help to measure its legal consequences).
On the other hand, and away from this request paper that I'm trying to create, I'm preparing a set of images that I've taken from the Scientific Center in order to make some sort of a proposal (in a form of a wholesale) that they might be interested in. The idea is to offer posters of some sort as a souvenir item for visitors, but that depends on their views and whether they think visitors would be interested in such an item or not. One step at a time...

This is some of the work done this week, and yet the image processing is still on its way and more to come. I didn't even put everything I've done here.
I do want so much to write some poem but my feelings are swinging so much and the work load is over, making it hard to concentrate on proper words.
Yet, I do ask myself, what's the worth of all of this... ?