Strobogenic IV…

As things are going crazy, and my continuous trials to calm myself down and take every day as it is, all I can say is: I'm tired. I'm absolutely tired. And guess what? Even though I don't have to go to work now with the lock-down, but still, I do feel so much pressure on my time, specially that I spend most of the daytime sleeping. Otherwise, things are going easy, sort of. Despite the total curfew or lock-down that had been issued and activated on Sunday May 10^th (it was partial for a month or more I think). All what I'm worried about is my coffee, and chocolate.

Strobo-Faces

And, again, I had an appointment with myself, doing some work with stroboscopic flashes, and this time a kind of a selfie. I did a number of selfies which I've posted about in previous posts, which were done using the stroboscopic flash, but back then, it was about the hand movement. This time, it would be about the head movement with a little change as well, and that is, fitting my speedlite here with a my (new) trusty oval diffuser!

One of the stroboscopic selfies made some months ago.

Oval diffuser from Impact.

Probably I've mentioned before in some old posts that I've lost this diffuser just a time when I really got used to it and started to love working with it because of the nature of diffusion and "atmospheric" light that it produces. Anyway, I've ordered this again some months back and now it is the first time to use this new one! As I've noted before, this time the selfies would include the movement of the head instead of the hands like before and I have to say it was challenging little bit. Despite being comfortable, staying in my chair and working with the camera (unlike other projects I've done like the chess project for example), still it was hard to pin the light, I guess one of the reasons was that I was shooting INFRARED selfies this time with my modified EOS 7D. So just imagine the hassle: Stroboscopic flash + Infrared filter on lens!

اِلْتِفاتْ
(Turning)

Despite setting the stroboscopic flash for 5 strikes, yet the number of ghosts always seemed to be less than 5. A simple movement like turning the head from the side and towards the camera did look harder than it should be! Eventually, anyway, I had to raise the power of the speedlite, as I'm working with infrared here and needed more power, plus the diffuser which of course would naturally need more power. These factors, of course, limited the number of possible strikes at the given frequency, so I had to satisfy myself with 3 or even 2 strikes alone. The results after all were not that bad and conveyed the needed surrealism.

تَجَلّي
(Manifestation)

Of course, things should not stop at the level of such a simple movement as turning my head around, right? So, the work started with doing some extra moves; Up and down, near the lens and far, or the reverse. But at this level I think I've dimmed the room a bit to have some space to lengthen the exposure time even for fractions and be able to adjust the number of strikes accordingly, and the frequency probably. One (digital) drawback of shooting with stroboscopic light is that such info (i.e. frequency, number of strikes) are not recorded in the EXIF, and I fail drastically when it comes to memorizing these settings with precision!

هَسْتيريا
(Hysteria)

I wasn't troubled much with the shortage in the number of strikes as much as I was troubled with the post-processing, as the grain or noise level was not comforting my eyes, despite using ISO100 for most or all of the shots (didn't check the EXIF thoroughly here!). I have to say though that the grain in infrared images is somewhat like a "brand" back when infrared used to be shot on special infrared film, thus it might be considered a typical look or something familiar, but I doubt many people know this fact anyway! Nevertheless, in the digital era things should be different I suppose. Anyway, I must admit that my editing practices to the RAW file here did add a spike to the level of grain here; I've been a bit aggressive with my approach! Nevertheless, the dark attitude and atmosphere did serve my purpose for presenting a psychopathic state of mind despite the grain or noise. If you ask why did I not try to clean the noise, well, the answer is obvious I guess, simply because it will degrade some details.

اِنْسِلاخْ
(Secession)

However, speaking of grain or noise is not all bad. In some shots like انسلاخ (Secession), the grain provided a pretty much needed texture to the skin and mimicked (unintentionally) the effect of changing skin or sloughing (as when the snake changes its skin). Adding a bit of sharpness to that, despite the grains, made quite the mood. Here we also see the virtue of shooting in infrared (with relatively low threshold value), where a brown eye like mine would change to blue; Higher threshold would get the shot closer and closer to be monochromatic with almost no hint of color. I think Secession is the best I did get out of this series in this experiment!

Surreal Appetite

I was going to leave the coming set of images for a later post but I realized that they are kind of connected, besides being a somewhat off-shot from the previous work with the stroboscopic flash. The thing with working with stroboscopic flash kind of triggered my appetite for more surreal portraiture work, but this time without the flash part; Simply, a camera and a lens.

جَدَلِيّ
(Argumentative)

The surreal work here involves the camera movement as you might have guessed already. I rarely use such techniques for anything in my photography, but with the lock-down and staying at home for weeks without stepping out, made me think of things that I didn't even thought I would think of… am I making any sense here?
Anyway, while virtually you can try such techniques of camera movements with anything, I preferred to do "portraiture" for my experiments. I wished to do selfies but this is kind of… impossible (I guess), so I picked my typical target: My brother.

وَسْواسْ
(Delusion)

Equipped with my Canon EF 50mm, I've set the camera on (TV) mode, and probably this is one of the rare occasions where I would use such a mode to shoot. Typically, I'm on Manual, Av, or Bulb. This is because I know the time that I need, so I want the camera to adjust the aperture for me. The time was set to 1 second only, which was enough for a quick twist to the camera. The aperture then was somewhere between f/11 and f/16. I have to say, producing some good lines with such movement is not as easy as I thought, and probably it would have been easier with light sources, but nevertheless, it was a good surreal experiment.

اِخْتِلاجُ فِكْرٍ 1
(A convulsion of thought 1)

اِخْتِلاجُ فِكْرٍ 2
(A convulsion of thought 2)

The processing of such images proved to be a challenge as well. But maybe this is more affected by the subject rather than the nature of the style itself? I'm not sure. I was struggling to strike a balance between adding contrast to the image to emphasize the motion blur lines and yet keep some dark areas untouched; A lot of dodge and burn and layer mask work.

Now with all this work with these images, there had been some photo-shoots on the side and I've started a series (somewhat) for some of these while planning to do so for some others as well, but I'll keep that for later times. I'm not sure though I'd be able to do a post in 2 weeks time from now, as I would be busy in preparing a blog post for my Arabic blog, or so I'm thinking for the time being!

Finale

Maybe I never imagined myself saying this, but as an introvert, this lock-down and situation is starting to suffocate me. Even though not much has changed in my life, and even I'm relaxing as much as I can (even with Ramadhan ongoing). But the stress that comes from the circle around me is pushing my buttons to some extent, specially with the regulations and the curfew (which turned to be almost full curfew for 22 hours a day) that makes going out for essentials a bit difficult (a permit is needed to go to the nearest supermarket and only to the nearest supermarket). Children on the other hand are also some hassle as they are gradually and slowly seem to lose sanity for not going outside like before, and not meeting their "comrades" in mornings like before. Keeping them amused is a hard task, and they are pushed to spend more time on devices; The thing that their parents were telling them not to do just some weeks ago. Strange times indeed…
Number of hits here is increasing by a ridiculous rate because of the stupid and careless people, which pushes me further into depression. Meanwhile, I'm trying as much as possible to think of ways to invest my time with my camera, and even to do something that might give me some extra income on the side if needed (but I didn't conclude anything yet). I've also started to follow some of my interests in astrology reading and watching videos, but mainly in a trial to understand myself before anything else.
On a positive note, it is May here and I don't remember the temperatures being as low as 33^oC in daytime like that for years. I've started a routine (if I can call it so) to stay in the yard for 20 minutes under the sun and read some e-books on my tablet. The real test for the temperature would be in June. Last year, June was the hottest month of the year with temperatures reaching 70^oC in some places here. We'll see if the coronavirus fixes this weather now, and minds as well.

جاحِظْ
(Pop-eyed)

Strobogenic II…

Things are going so fast that it feels like I didn't post here for a month or so. Because of the nCoV-19 pandemic, people are going crazy here. My workplace decided to give everyone 2 weeks off until things calm down. Thus, more time to work with my camera hopefully, until March 15^th. Probably because of that, it does feel like ages since I've posted here and actually time is kind of passing slowly. However, I'm not complaining; I'm counting my blessings here and thank goodness for the fact that I don't have to drive in that daily mess!
Anyway, I've been working with my camera and doing many things with some old photos trying new editing techniques but I'll save that for later. For this week's post, I just want to focus on my work with the stroboscopic lighting which I've established by my last post (or before?).

Strobogenic II

In continuation for my work with the stroboscopic light, and after doing a number of selfies which I've posted about last time (before my RP post), I've kept on working on a little experiment, with roses this time. Initially, this was not my idea; I was thinking of a real model (I mean, someone posing for me in general not a paid model), but that didn't happen unfortunately (still seeking that goal though!). Nevertheless, it was a good experiment somehow from which I've learned from some mistakes (or "misfortunes" if I can call them so).

Grungy Passion

The idea was simple, throw a rose and record that in a stroboscopic manner. However, I've read online in some texts about the topic that the background should be black. For me, I've neglected this particular point simply because I don't have a black background, but I thought working in a dark room would somehow solve the problem. Also, doing my calculations in relation to the shutter speed, the frequency, and the number of flashes, I've realized practically that I do need a dark room to lengthen the exposure freely; Lengthening the exposure here does not really have to extend in terms of seconds or anything. It can still be parts of a second but still considered "slow" in terms of motion (does that make any sense?). Speaking about something in the order of 1/30 of a second and up to a second and beyond.

Side note: Using a shutter of 1/30s with the maximum frequency of 199Hz on the speedlite yields about 6 strikes of flash, which means the motion can be recorded on the sensor with such shutter speed and frequency on 6 moments during this exposure time. Notice that I'm not talking here about anything related to the power of the speedlite. In fact, at some point and under some settings, the speedlite options would limit the number of strikes that can be set in the configuration menu, and this is in relation to the expected power consumption and some issues related to the protection of the speedlite from overheating. Trust me, the heat is a serious issue even with such small units. For this reason, using multiple speedlites with each dialed to relatively low power is a good choice to overcome these limitations.

Receptive

Thus, with a shutter speed of 1/30s it would be better to work in a dark room as much as possible to avoid unwanted ambient light and leave the speedlites to take control over the whole recording of the scene. Nevertheless, I had my own problems with the white wall here, for obvious reasons! Anyway, in the processing phase, the amount of grain produced was great at times, beyond repair, so I just made it part of the image, as in Grungy Passion. Worth noting here that this image specifically was flipped upside down to make the rose as to be falling down, instead of being thrown up. In fact, the gesture here probably helped a lot. Along that line, in Receptive, the image has been turned for 90^o to mimic that receptive motion as if the rose is falling from above, and I tried to emphasize "the visual reading" from the right side here by flipping the image to let the hand start or initiate from that corner. Generally, most of these images were processed with saturated colors but saturating the Red tones only. Cropping as well was a vital tool here and I went beyond the typical cropping limits of Photoshop (remember, I have an older version which has nothing but the rule of thirds embedded to help in cropping).

Side note: In image design, or let's say it is generally accepted, that a viewer, any viewer, would start reading an image "visually" and try to analyze its elements starting from the "natural" direction for that viewer in terms of writing and reading, usually. Thus, if the viewer comes from a culture that reads and writes in left-to-right manner, then "reading" an image would naturally start off from the left. For this reason, I'm trying to emphasize my vision and my background culture by trying to emphasize the direction of reading on the photos I create, as in Receptive (and in Passionately Reluctant as will be shown), where the reading should probably start from the right side because the hand is anchored towards the lower-right corner. 

Passionately Reluctant

This trend of moving things or flipping things to the right side continued with Passionately Reluctant, which is apparently not in a square format (or 1:1 ratio) but rather in some weird elongated ratio here and the reason for that is I tried to keep the motion of the rose inline and coherent with the rule of the golden spiral. However, I had to change the aspect ratio here a bit to fit the curvy line for the golden spiral with the motion of the rose, which ironically, takes away the "golden2 out of it (in case you didn't know, there are other spirals named after metals and each one of them have a different ratio attached to it). This one though didn't appear as throwing the rose up (though I actually did but holding the tip of the stem only). It appeared as if I'm moving forward and backward with it. It doesn't matter anyway; I like the motion after all. Probably the grain here is not quite pronounced but it is there still. I'm not sure though if I did some noise reduction here or not, but for sure I did emphasize the red tones for the rose.
At this level, I've realized that a single rose is not quite "pronounced," if I can call it so. I had this impression that just one rose was not quite enough, specially that the images that I see and judge are viewed from the LCD of the camera; Those images you see here been subjected to a heavy work of dodge and burn and contrast enhancement along the way. In the original RAW files, the trace of the single rose was barely visible. So, in order to enhance my chances, I've decided to throw the whole bouquet of roses!

انْفِراج (relief)

I'm not sure why I named the last shot in the series in Arabic really but I just felt like it. This image as well puts more emphasis (in my opinion) on reading from the right, because if you start reading the image from the left, it would be as if the roses are being caught and not released, in opposition to the title; and again, as I always advocate, the title of the image is part of the image and an essential part of it - NEVER leave your image without a title. Thus, to convey the meaning of releasing and relief, one must start from the right to understand the image properly!
Technical: I didn't go through the technical details in the beginning, but here how was the setup: I've used all my speedlites (7), but one of them was for controlling the other six. So, in action, 6 speedlites were shooting; The seventh remained on-camera to trigger (the in-camera wireless option doesn't work in Multi mode). The speedlites were pointed to a wall in front of me to bounce the light from that wall onto the scene. The room I was in was small so this move did light the wall in the background in these images - for this reason, a black background should be a must in making shots like these. Not saying a white background won't be artistic in any way though, it is definitely a delicate matter and it often gets out of control.

Finale

Now, this is a second patch of the stroboscopic work. At the time of typing these words, I did indeed produce many more images and did other experiments, as I've stated above. During this holiday though I must also invest some time in other important things... like playing games!
With all the fuss and mess going on about the Coronavirus worldwide and the fear spreading over people, I do find myself having some strange feelings deep inside. I don't know what are these feelings, but something makes me calm, and chilling. Some annoyances are there for sure but the general theme here is, quiet. Could it be because of being away from the daily jams? The workplace? The lone nights that I got to spend wandering alone with my thoughts or working with the camera? I don't know. With this tranquility, though, comes a sense of worthlessness for this world. Maybe it is a time period of re-evaluating my life? Memories are visiting me a lot lately, lifting me to some status between soberness and drunkenness; A happy ecstasy and yet a sad one in the same time. Such weird feelings that I'm not able to translate at all for the moment, nor any help could be sought from Google Translate for that as well…I'm just here, waiting for happiness to happen.

Strobogenic…

February! It really exists! If some other month like January is to be visiting us any time this year I'm kind of sure that half the population of Earth would be begging on the roads for their bread. from my side, I just hope that this month becomes an active month for me somewhat. I've been taking shots already and having some ideas here and there, and as usual, I won't put the eggs all in one basket in this post, but I'll be talking about a specific series of shots that I've done about 2 weeks ago; All by coincidence! Anyway, beside the series I'm going to talk about, there are some new editions made out of old shots and I've been posting some of those on my Instagram. I'm not sure though if I'm going to post about them here but there is one specific old shot that I need to post about here in relation to the series of shots I'm going to talk about.

Chain of Events

As I was looking at my images from 2018, and looking specifically for some photo that I didn't post before to my Instagram, I've encountered this shot, which is a selfie, but a regular one somewhat. The special thing, though, about this selfie, that it was an experimental one, taken with 2 speedlites holding them by hand on left and right, and each one of them had a black cardboard with a thin slit opening only. And that what made the shadow line at the center of the face. Since a selfie like that might be a bit "regular," I've decided to work a bit on it and transform it to something else.

Nach Mitnacht

Naturally, my first choice or the first thing to think about in such instances is to examine the B&W possibility and what it would yield. Tweaking the sliders around and voila! Some weird creature was created here, in addition to the eyes brightening. This was the beginning.
Some days later, as I was testing the stroboscopic (multi) flash properties with one of my 580EX II speedlites, I've decided to take a selfie or two. I was actually lazy; I was just there sitting on my recliner and taking shots. My aim was actually to make out some sense for the relation between the shutter speed, and number of flashes and the final outcome. I really did not have any aim about creating an image at this level; It was all still some testing only.
Anyway, without  going deeper into much technical details and talk,I was up to a surprise later on; I'll come to that.
As I went through the photos, I've started to filter and delete some of them which had no significant move. There are some with some good hand gestures. I kept those and started to work with them in Photoshop.

Avoidance

Typically, my first step when converting to B&W in Photoshop, would be using the Infrared preset from the list and start adjusting from there. Usually this preset do get to my taste in some way so I find it appropriate most of the time to start adjusting the tones from there. Surprise surprise, and as I was trying to suppress the background using the tones to turn it to black, weird things started to happen and I've remembered Nach Mitnacht right away. This was the spark that initiated the series, started from Avoidance and ending up with The Weekend Selfie. Some of these shots, like Avoidance, did require a significant crop (using cropping guides as much as possible). Despite the movement of the hands in some of these images, like, again, Avoidance, yet, the focus might be scattered away and I thought it might be better to ensure the focus and guide the viewer to the eye, and that required a great deal of a crop.

De-Focus

Not all images, though, did require such a big deal of cropping as I've stated above, but there was something to be done about some lines in the corners or the edges and such. For such instances, I tried to place the eyes exactly at the center of the image, as it sounds it is the natural placement for them, specially with moving ghosted palms, right? And let's not forget the horizontal placement of the eyes which I've tried to place on the upper third line via crop.

The Multi-Takser

Personally, I do like the brightness of the eyes in De-Focus more than their brightness in The Multi-Tasker but strangely, and this is the surprise, this image got popular on YouPic and even gained a star for being "inspirational". Not only that, but YouPic also published the image to their Instagram feed for the B&W category! I didn't know about its existence before. On Instagram itself, the image did gain some likes, but typically not much (yet better than other images I post daily now). I take it that this surprise might have been caused by the movement of the hand which is clearer and denser here than in De-Focus, and they take a bigger portion of the image in general.

The Weekend Selfie

This "liking" and push in (some of) the social media did give me a bit of "hype," if I can call it so. It did really make me think of future work using the stroboscopic flash often (which I did later, but that's for another post). But maybe the most important moral here which I need to remember, and keep remembering, always is that: Just grab the camera, and shoot, even when you are lazy. You wouldn't know what will be the results. In addition to this, I might be adding one extra point to my "style" with such processing, which makes portraits dark in a somewhat UV Photography style. Could be something to venture on a bit further. But probably shouldn't exhaust it to the limit of turning it into a cliché!

Finale

The Weekend Selfie
Sketch effect

Well, it is February already and the time has come, as in every year, to make up some photo shoot for Retinitis Pigmentosa. Believe or not, I did already make this shot and it is published, but I'll leave it for another post in another week or so. The shot was relatively simple and I tried to apply some elements from the designing tips I've re-learned lately. I'll come to that in time then, though.

Some variety of flash cords

Meanwhile, I'm hoping and wishing to get more time to work with my camera, specially with schools starting here and we are back to the cycle of traffic jams and the extremely-tired body. I have some ideas out there and yet I need to think them through and think on how to apply them. To add to my hardships already, my flash cord (which allows me to trigger the flash off-camera) seems corrupt and is not functioning well lately. It fell off. Is it time to get a wireless trigger? I mean one that can work under HSS and Multi or Stroboscopic modes, as well as 2nd Curtain Sync? Even if I got one, I'm not sure I would be able to trigger other speedlites that way unless I get a receiver for each one of them; A lengthy and an expensive task. I'll need to do more research in that venue.
I would be going on and on with my mood swings already but maybe I'll keep that, too, for another post. I'm so tired of everything here, literally, so much that I find it hard to chew the food I eat sometimes. January is over already but probably we are not over yet with the bad news still. In the meantime, I'm considering meditation (which I'm not sure when to do) in hope that it would teach me how to focus again. I miss writing poetry; I was supposed to write one for my late friend, Paula, who departed last November, but I couldn't find the mental power yet to compose. Maybe I should make this a priority over my work with the camera. As for now, it's time to close my eyes a bit…

Quickie Quick…

It's getting busy at work (mainly related to reasons of stupidity) as well as an expo to attend to, so I'm not supposed to be typing this right now actually. I barely have the time! But anyway, just a quick stroll through things I've been doing lately.

First to mention is the project for July which seems I'm quite behind with. Despite my trials to create something but, so far, nothing is good. To me at least. The project for July is about Motion and Splashes. As I did splashes before (and it's messy) I didn't want to get into it right now (despite the fun!) and instead headed to try and shoot something for Motion. My first target was my watches.

Static

I was approaching this idea from various philosophies (past and present, old and new, stable and changing, you name it) but unfortunately the set itself was not appropriate and the watches were not as well it seems. The main technique was to use the Multi (Stroboscopic) properties of my speedlites to record the movement of the seconds hand on one of the watches (by flashing every second) but that never worked. My thought was that the size is not proper for this mission. Thus, after many failed trials, including Static above, I had to abandon this set and try it out with something else. Something bigger.

Waiting

My next approach was to set my wall clock with a withered rose (no worries, it's artificial one and burnt a little to mimic the effect as much as possible). In Waiting, my idea of motion got a blend of my passion for Sabah Fakhri [صباح فخري] and was inspired from 2 lines from one of his songs. As the title depicts, it is about waiting someone in vain. Here too, unfortunately, my speedlite's stroboscopic option failed to get the movement. It seems that the hands must and better to be in white for better reflection. Anyway, as I was working on this, and because of using a wide aperture (f/2, to blur the background), the lowest power in the flash were overloading the scene with highlights. Thus, I had to fix my B+W 092 Infrared filter on the lens (50mm) to lower the power down. Since the stroboscopic option didn't work here either, it was inevitable to mimic the multiple exposure effect using several shots taken in a periodic manner (using intervalometer); as Canon EOS 7D does not have the option for multi-exposure. The final image though, Waiting, is composed from some of these images (total 20) and not all of them since I wanted to make some more spaces between the movements of the minutes hands from one image to another. And for some reason there were some shots where the flash did not fire, probably because the speedlite (which was off-camera and triggered wirelessly) did not get the signal properly from the master on camera. Anyway, I'm still not so satisfied about this blend for the images and I might re-do it again with proper, shallower depth of field if possible and better blend.

However, in this mess with this project, in the last few days remaining of July, I suddenly got the urge to perform some new 3D anaglyph, starting with a selfie (well, no need to post it here anyway) and a video; since I do have two cameras already! But there were some preparations to be made for my converted camera of course, mainly using a hot mirror filter to block IR as much as possible as in normal cameras.

It was a sluggish work though but it is a beginning. The settings for the two camera were kept identical as much as possible, but for the white balance I had to use my WB Disk to calibrate both cameras to the same degree of color correction even with hot mirror filter being placed on the lens. I used here my Canon EF 50mm lens on my converted camera, while placing my very old kit lens (18-55mm) on my regular camera. I did shoot various videos after the first video (above) but seems the first one was the best. In editing phase, though, I had to minimize the size of one of the videos to fit the other one; quite a tedious task for me since I don't know much about video editing, but well, learning still. The 3D anaglyph video above is not that good though and it comes to me that it is probably better to use wide angles to record such videos at the moment, and lenses with focal length of 50mm and more would need closer spacing between the two lenses to have a good quality 3D anaglyph video. Just a thought and applying this would come later hopefully. Meanwhile, these spintops did indeed flip my brain back to the Motion project as I will try to do some experiments again with them, for the project this time. Yet, I guess I need to wait for the weekend to arrive as I'm busy with many things during weekdays now. See you later!