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.

Mental Diaspora…

Some weeks passed without counting them. I had to stop writing in this blog for a while (and the Arabic one too of course) after some drastic downfall in my mother's health; something almost costed her her life. Even though she is in a better condition somewhat but it is far from being the normal-her, as she is mostly bound to bed here at home and I'm trying, with the rest of the family, to take care of her and most importantly of all, to raise her self-esteem and make her smile despite the painful times.
Meanwhile, I was in fact trying to prepare for some photographic experiments which eventually were put on hold after the events, and trying slowly to get back to the pace and even trying to force myself to work on some projects.
I know, though, that some photographers advise against forcing oneself to work with the camera and leave it to inspiration alone, and initially I'm in that line of thought, but circumstances right now require some special measures, and probably forcing myself might take my mind off from the domestic problems that plague my life for the time being.

Let's Cook!

I've attended (and will in the near future) a workshop with members of the group given by the leader of the group which was about the imagination of the photographer and how to develop it. Our main theme for the practical part of the workshop was "kitchen utensils."
The topic of the workshop was, in some sense, forcing your brain to think differently about ordinary subjects (with a side dish of planning beforehand).

Boring Cold
Canon EF 50mm + B+W 920 IR filter,
f/9, 320^-1sec, ISO200.

Before the practical part, I've picked a box of utensils which I didn't really consider what was in it, and thus I had no time to explore or think about what to do until I reached the meeting place. Anyway, the first idea to pop in my mind was to use a friend with 2 ladles as hands and show some boredom, as seen in Boring Cold. To add flavor to this shot specifically, an infrared filter was placed on lens (using my converted camera here and 580EXII speedlite on camera with diffuser). I didn't feel comfortable with this one, and probably my friend here didn't gauge his expression perfectly (trust me, modeling needs skills). I changed to my second idea which was inspired by the Jolly Roger flag (and, let's not talk how I got the inspiration).

Kuwaiti Jack Nickolson
Canon EF 50mm, f/9, 250^-1sec, ISO200.

Using the same converted camera but without any filter on the lens, and also a speedlite here, the Kuwaiti Jack Nickolson was supposedly to be looking like the Jolly Roger, but with the facial expressions here and the hardships in holding the ladles in proper positions, the idea drifted away from that. Anyway, I liked the looks here so I worked for some time on enhancing the sharpness and the colors (specially the eyes and the mouth) to make it look more like a maniac's profile shot! The sharpness here was exaggerated on purpose and it was not done with convenient plugins (e.g. NIK or Noise Ninja), but it was done manually using layers in Photoshop (implementing the High Pass command). After these 2 shots, seeing that I don't work well with faces, I decided to concentrate more on the abstract lane of my thoughts and started playing around with the same ladles to come up with something unusual.

Metallic Lane
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/14, 250^-1sec, ISO200.

I've finally arrived at that idea when I made a contact between the bottoms of the ladles (and it was hard to stabilize the set). Usually in such situations, I automatically switch my mind to think about macro details and look for abstracts and shapes, just like in this situation with Metallic Lane. A twist to the WB was applied to give it that bluish luster instead of the dull metallic one.
Major problem with these experiments is that the ladles were scratched and not polished in a good way, and however I washed them the stains and scratches remained. The practical part of this workshop was not the final deadline to present some work but it was a practice under the guidance of the founder and the teacher of the group, and we agreed to give results one week later which unfortunately passed without doing anything, since I've been busy with my messy life. However, I got new ladles with good polish and worked on them later on, as I will explain later in Rain-Bubbles section below.

Nailed It…

Before the dramatic events with Mom, I was already working on a little project, related to my previous post, The Fakhroid Muse, which is about getting inspired from a song or songs from the Syrian master, Sabah Fakhry (صباح فخري). Might be a good idea to read that blog post if you didn't.
I've been working on this idea, as I've said, before the dramatic events, and even after Mom being out of the hospital, I couldn't put a mind to it and finish it until just recently. I have to say though that I did a lot, a lot, of testing shots. The main problem was that the set was on ground level and I had to find a way to levitate the camera up to a certain level from the set (beside finding the good lens and the good position for speedlites).

Lovely Pain
Voigtländer 20mm, f/4.5, 4000^-1sec, ISO200.

Generally speaking, the idea was inspired from the same song discussed in the Fakhroid Muse post, but a different line:

أثاريك نسيتني مع الأيام
ورضيت تفوتني على الآلام

Just to find you've forgot about me along the days
And you were satisfied to let me through the pains

The second line of this verse is the one that ticked in my mind and decided to implement the idea here. I've spent some time drawing a valentine heart on a cardboard and pinning some nails in it as it can be seen in Lovely Pain. In the beginning, the idea was to use 15mm fisheye lens because its perspective would help on forming the valentine heart more clearly (because of the distortion), but the wide field of view made it problematic to use such a lens, specially with speedlites placed around the set. As it can be seen above, the shutter speed is high, because I wanted to kill the ambient light completely (and of course that requires working in High-Speed mode).
I wanted to work with red food coloring in the beginning too, but apparently that was hard to show on metallic heads and (since I had no model to work with except of myself) it would make a mess for me, thus it was safer to work with red gel filter placed on the main speedlite. One speedlite was actually enough, sort of, but added another one on its side (was planned to light the feet alone), and for this we have here light heads sparkling (and lighter red tone). At the end, I've changed to Voigtländer 20mm lens for it is not as wide as the 15mm fisheye lens. Working with this lens can be tricky somewhat since it is manual completely and I had to re-focus as I adjusted the elevation and the direction of the camera several times (beside changing the spot to be under the focus several times).
The tricky part here is after shooting: on camera's LCD view, everything was alright, but when the file is opened on PC with large monitor, the valentine heart is barely recognizable and would require longer time of concentration to realize that it is a heart. Maybe it was my mistake even to draw it in reverse like that!
I'm still on the lookout for more inspiration and probably from the same song still. I do have some ideas already as I'm typing this, but the vivid glimpse of this idea would require having a model - someone to work with; something I'm not good at, and not available as well for me (of course, unless I pay money for a professional model I believe). I'll keep that for later though.

Rain-Bubbles

As a continuation for the kitchen utensils project which was started with the workshop mentioned in the first section of this post, Let's Cook!, I've tried to work with new ladles I've purchased specially for this project, and they are with good polish (but completely though). Big, small, and some tiny metallic container; I liked how they looked in the store without really thinking what to do with them. It took me some time to wander and to look, and finally got the idea of shooting reflections in some way, since these utensils do look like half spherical mirrors (concave or convex). Anyway, I did reflections, but in some other way. Completely different way!

Qtar 1 (droplets 1)
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/10, 250^-1sec, ISO100.

As for the title of the image above, Qtar, I somewhat miss the Maltese language so I decided to use Maltese to name this series of images. After roaming my mind about, I finally sought hanging the ladle on the edge of a table (using clamp) and putting some drops of corn syrup (as a substitute for glycerine); water won't help much here with its low viscosity. Of course a setting as plain as this seem boring, so we have to add some colors to add life to the abstract, and thus I got colored sticks (like those tongue depressors used by doctors) out of my accessories arsenal, and placed them on the top of the ladle making a small window for the lens to peak into the droplets.

Full setting used with 2 speedlites. As it can be seen, the tripod legs were opened wider to get lower and closer to the ladle. Upon the ladle sit a number of colored sticks. Click to enlarge.

The first problem to encounter is which proper lens to use and I have discovered that sometimes, lot of times, we tend to complicate things instead of going directly to the problem. After trying a lot of lighting methods, and lenses with extension tubes, I reached the decision that I should keep it simple: single lens, no tubes, and even speedlite without any modifiers. The only thing here, as seen in the settings, the speedlites were not pointing directly but almost lighting the edge of the ladle which in turn spread the light all around the droplets.

Qtar 2
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/3.5, 200^-1sec, ISO100.

Qtar 3
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/2.8, 200^-1sec, ISO100.

Qtar 4
Canon EF 100mm macro, f/10, 250^-1sec, ISO100.

As it can be seen here with this series of 4 shots, each change in the aperture (i.e. f-number) or the direction or power of the speedlite can produce interesting results; all that without touching anything in the settings but only changing the parameters in the camera and speedlite. Not to say also, the order of the colored sticks can be changed or the colors themselves (or even use something else other than sticks). Such a simple experiment can have great variety of results and the expectations are limitless!
Probably of the 4 above, Qtar 3 is the most liked one. Processing these images underwent a number of cleaning processes and adding lens blur to remove some of the scratches in the background (except for Qtar 3).

Finale

My mind is scrambled right now after all the dramatic events. Somewhat the world doesn't mean much for me. I don't feel it. But in the middle of all this sway and trying hard to concentrate and to work on something I like, to take my mind off from my personal problems, despite the fact that my work of art would mostly reflect some of the personality side, as in Lovely Pain.
On the other hand, my addiction to games is increasing as well as a way to escape reality (and people), as well as my worries. What does the future hold? Would I be able to see the outside world again? I'm going back to work by next Sunday, just to add more to my mental struggles…

Alexander 6, V75.

 Calm day relatively after all the fuss that happened yesterday. Yet, working with Ayvarith right now jammed my brain little bit. Finally I finished the additions and fixes. Now it is time to pour everything on the HTML files, or rather convert these text documents into HTML. In the meantime as well, I'm going on thinking of a layout for the webpage I'm planning to do, which is something not settled yet in my mind.

Been writing down some words that were cooking in my mind for a while, and finally put them on paper here. I called it Let Go The Passion. I've submitted the same piece into another website that I've known recently, www.songwritingfever.com. A nice website I'd say for wanna-be-artists. I've submitted the piece for opinions only.

Unfortunately I didn't find something really useful with my digging up in the photos of last year's visit to Ireland, but hopefully I shall try again today (tonight) and upload them up into the web. I found some that would turn out great, but neither HDR merging nor Exposure Fusion were successful in eliminating some of the hard artifacts. Most of these photos were taken from the boat. I would still, maybe, make something out of a single shot rather than merging 3 of them together, but I'm not sure of the outcome.

Checking up with DHL now, and I'm glad my shipment had finally moved a bit, though still in the USA. I need this VR head now to try it out with my latest lab projects, since I gave up the hope completely in anything good about the stitch. They were simply, erratic!

Signed out for an earlier leave, so I must submit this now, and go back home and play a game that I've been waiting to play for some time!
Tschüss!
__________
1777. in that moment a shout from afar cut off the silence
1778. "hey you! what are you doing?" someone said
1779. Alexander looked behind him and saw no one
1780. he looked back to the tree and wanted to get close
1781. but the shout again appeared again and louder even
1782. he stopped and looked around but no one he could see
1783. until he felt something that hurts his feet
1784. he jumped a bit and looked down with anger
1785. and found out a dwarf creature close to his feet
1786. Alexander got surprised for the size of that thing
1787. and down to his knees he knelt to see
1788. then Alexander asked: are you talking to me?
1789. the bad tempered dwarf replied: you see others here?
1790. Alexander replied with confidence: no, but who are you?
1791. the dwarf replied with anger: I think I should ask you this!
1792. Alexander answered calmly: my name is Alexander,
1793. a stranger from these lands and seeking my destination,
1794. now would you please tell me who are you?
1795. the dwarf replied with a high pitched voice
1796. "I am Kaliván, and the owner of this half of the lands"
1797. Alexander stepped back then and said: Ah! Sorry then!
1798. I did step here by mistake as I am a stranger,
1799. but what is wrong with this tree of shadow?
1800. then the dwarf sighed and looked down