Alexander 6, V42.

Salary is here and my hand is itchy! I'm biting my fingers trying to save some now! With the volcano in Iceland and its effects on Europe, my thoughts are shaken further for the possibility of going to Ireland this year. Well, I still have some images to work on I guess!
Mentioning the images here, I just remembered that I had in my stock some images that I didn't process from Failaka. I thought I finished them all but I didn't. Some of them, well, not so good to my eyes but uploaded for fun in my Photobucket, and maybe one only will be uploaded to the stock to see if it is accepted, and ironically, it is the one that I had problems with the most. It is a small panorama for a hall or a guest room situated outside of the old abandoned house that I snapped its façade before:

The Old House...

The Guest Room

Such rooms or halls are usually kept separated from the main house and typically used for men gathering, or as Kuwaitis call it, Diwaniyah. I liked the ornaments and decorations in the ceiling and when I stiched this the first time I liked it because of stretching angle into the horizon making a sense of a wide room somehow. But I discovered many problems in stitching and mainly because the repetitive patterns, as I believe. Tried to minimize it to the best again and stitched but there were still errors that I had to fix in Photoshop later. Might not be obvious on a small scale but definetely would be in the original, which I'm planning to upload for the stock. The projection here is Rectangular, but it wouldn't make much difference if we used Vedutismo or Mercator as well. Other projections would give so much bulging effect making the room like a bubble and losing the parallel lines and the stretching tiles in the ceiling. The door at the end is for a small bathroom, while the whole next to it is used for the old-fashioned air-conditioners (with their noisy motor!). I liked those old stuff so much. The golden hue here is added, and say thanks to the HDR technique where I was able to manipulate light and colors as much as possible without much fuss or banding. There was though, as it seems, one problem done during the snapping process; my camera was probably tilted and not completely vertical, and hence I couldn't align the center point in equi-distances from left- and righ-sides in such a way that a straight line would pass through the tiles in the middle to the corner of the room. Moreover, I wish if I had a ladder or something to elevate my camera level more and approach the ceiling a bit closer than this. I think it would be a nice effect and gives more stretch to the tiles of the ceiling, and hence more illusion of space!

Along with this image, which unfortunately forgot to send it to friends in my previous email along with a collection of images, comes:

Red Fields

Ruins

The second image seems to be the ruins of the TV broadcast station. I know there used to be one on Failaka island. I might consider putting this to the stock as well, although, I'm not so optimistic about it for the blur involved. I think it is more caused by the noise reduction software.

Meanwhile, I took the chance to turn the old garden panorama from a cylindrical panorama to a complete spherical panorama, but unfotunately that didn't work. Apparently, more pictures were needed to cover up some holes around the zenith, because the image taken for the zenith did not cover all the proposed area. But that does not mean giving up hope completely, I would still be able, somehow, to encode into a spherical panorama by using the ratio 2:1, and by doing some tricks, dspite my belief that it won't as good as a unique full one. I already had hard time trying to stitch it again yesterday!

Trying to push myself as much as I can to work my brain again with poetry, here comes a second one I made after long period of silence, and I called it, Let Be. It is a little dedication to someone. I'm trying to follow some of the known rhythm patterns here instead of my old way of writing anonymously with different rhymes and patterns, and I try even to equalize the number of syllables in each line. That is such a hard job indeed and I do work with 2 or 3 dictionaries sometimes to find thesaurus and appropriate words and rhyming. The last one mentioned here follows the Alfred Dorn Sonnet rhyme. Although I don't know much of the history of such pattern or when or how to use it, but it all comes in one easy freeware that helped me a lot before: Verse Perfect. It has many useful things for a poet or a song writer. Rhyming patterns, suggestions for rhyming words, synonyms, antonyms, syllables count, and many other things that I've never used, yet! Please say thanks to Bryant McGill for such a beautiful software, freeware! Please make sure no youngsters beside you when you view his page :)

Reviewing now my conlang Ayvarith, and probably there were some evolutions going behind my back! There are some short vowels placement in verbs that did change by time and how I say them. This gives me an idea if what is happening now is a minimized version of the real language evolution. They say in Europe specifically, Danish and Norwegian are the most evolutionary and mostly changing languages. It feels awkward now as I intend to re-build my homepage, and such changes might require either more revisions, or re-building the already existing HTML pages, at least the grammar page (which is not an easy one to do really). Trespassing the limits of 2100 lines now in Alexander's story so, the build of the new homepage is coming closer.

__________
985. Alexander looked to his left and saw a child
986. the child stepped back then he started to shout
987. "Shágí! Shágí! Help!"
988. it was but merely few moments when all people gathered
989. some with daggers and some with sticks
990. and some of them carried stones and came up
991. and all of them surrounded poor Alexander and his friend
992. then Birbuár whispered to Alexander: oh! I told you!
993. let us get out of here now! no need for pains!
994. but Alexander sulked and his eyes went fierce
995. and he faced the people and shouted at them
996. "O people of Táhús, is this how you host a stranger?"
997. then a man showed from the crowds and was holding a hammer
998. "a stranger with a Shágí? and what Shágí? Birbuár!"
999. thus Alexander whispered to Birbuár and said
1000. "verily he knows you, do you know him as well?"
1001. and Birbuár whispered with his head down to the ground
1002. "yes, this is a smith of our village, Shdáyur,
1003. I tried to trick his daughter and cursed his mother before"
1004. and Alexander raised his eyebrows and said with a surprise
1005. "you were indeed a cursed man then my friend!,
1006. no wonder they want you out of this village then!"
1007. and people started to get closer to Alexander and his friend
1008. and the circle was getting smaller and smaller

Alexander 6, V37.

Well Well. One busy day I presume. I shall call this day, the day of Panoramas. I've taken lot of short panoramas either vertically or horizontally and most of them were with my fisheye lens. Too bad it doesn't have a zooming capability, as I am working with the images now, seems some of them are going to be small with big portion of the sky showing on. All of that, in Failaka island.
The sea is great. Can be full of wrath, but generous after all. Some of the panoramas I did today were not really exactly to be called a panorama, but rather I loved to include more portions of the sky in the image and hence, I prefered to take them on parts vertically to add a bit more of the sky. The weather was weird though, shiny and cloudy in the same time! And while we were approaching Failaka port, the Salmiyah city port on the main land was still obvious. Such view I've never seen before. The two do not appear in the same time usually.

As luck has it, I was able to view the shores of Miskan island from Failaka's northern shores. Also, there was this abandoned center for seafaring activities which, supposedly as stated on sign posts, would provide a pick-up to Miskan island. Yet, the place was abandoned and no one was there, despite the relatively apparently-new yachts or boats over there. I could see 2 long towers from where I stood... too bad I didn't snap it with my camera! Bad me! I wonder if they were lighthouses as I always thought, or some "chimneys" of some factory over there? Could be? I don't know. Everything is possible after the statement of this man in Silsan, in which he said going there is restricted by now! It was foggy, I could see that. Like some blackish or greyish smoke hovering around the two towers for some reason, and that's why I thought they were chimneys of some sort or an exhaust of some factory and not lighthouses. This view kind of revived the hope in me of visiting this island one day, and I was already looking for someone to ask about going there in Failaka island itself, but no luck.
Not only Miskan was visible, but also the lands of Auhah (عوهة) island was visible before arriving at Failaka's port. I don't know really why they translate it as "Auhah" since we say it as "Oohah" usually, but anyway this is how it is spelled and you check it yourself on Wikipedia.

In the beginning, I played a little prank on myself, again. I got shocked to see the schedule time in the time table for the ferry travels to be delayed more than I thought it was. It said the ferry would leave at 9:00 and come back at 3:00 afternoon, and frankly I wouldn't like to stay there till 3:00 by myself. Yet the date of today, 14th, was on Thursday. I really doubted myself "did I miss counting my days because of this little vacation of mine?". After all I discovered it is all because I was looking at the time table of January 2010 and not this month! Not the first time I do this really.

I was planning to take an inner panorama of that old mesh-holed building, which I think was some governmental place, but I changed my mind later and thought of taking a panorama of the outer area. Moving people there with their four-wheeled banshi all around really frustrated me. I could hard even park there and take the panorama from the outside.

The ruined building from the outside.

What seems to be an ex-electricity housing, in the periphery of the ruined

building and includes in the to-be panorama project.

This said, I'm looking forward now to have some sort of a software to fix my fisheye distortion for real now. The PTGui software, for stitching panoramas, usually takes care of such distortions, but I can't tell it does them as well for single images however. Thus, I'm looking for some software or plug-in to do so. Photoshop does it as well, but it sounds a bit tiresome in Photoshop, and maybe I would get more precise tools out of the framework of Photoshop. I wish if there is any program that would fix a straight line by specifying 2 dots marking the beginning and the ending of a proposed straight line in the image. Maybe there is one, I can't tell really.
Talking about a plug-in, I received a response from HDRsoft people about my suggestion for a web plug-in to view HDR images, and here I quote it for you:

Dear TJ,

Thank you for your interest in Photomatix and for suggesting an HDR plug-in for web browsers.

The closest thing to a plug-in for  displaying HDR images in browser that we know of is webHDR:
http://luminance.londonmet.ac.uk/webhdr/

It might also be worthwhile having a look at Christan Bloch's 'HDRI Labs' website for such software:
http://www.hdrlabs.com/

Regarding Photomatix, we don't have any plans to develop a web browser plug-in to display HDR images at the moment.


Kind regards,

Andreas
Photomatix Support Team
www.hdrsoft.com

This is nice so far. I'm still checking the website as I am writing this (and I'm doing all of that after getting back from that tiresome ferry trip). I don't feel like concentrating on anything so I might leave it for later. In a quick glance over the webpage, there are some freeware included, but I can't tell which one is to be used as a plug-in to view HDR in the web browser, if any. I guess I'm going to ask Blochi for this! Blochi in case you didn't know is Christian Bloch, the author of this magnificent book:

As for now... I should take a rest and work on batch-processing my bracketed images and put them into OpenEXR format for heavy use later. I leave you now with Alexander's story, verse 37.

__________
865. when the stranger calmed down he gazed upon Alexander
866. and Alexander smiled back at him and put down Charnagút
867. then Alexander began the speech again with the stranger
868. "tell me O friend, what is your name?"
869. and the thing said: my name is Birbuár, son of Árúc
870. then Alexander asked: you know this sword? why were you scared?
871. the strange thing then stuttered and said: of course I do,
872. it is the Charnagút, the sword of the great Ayvar king,
873. it is the torture of the sinners and the sign of kings,
874. thus now I believe you are indeed a king,
875. please forgive my impoliteness master
876. then Alexander said: I am not your master,
877. but I am happy to be your friend in this world,
878. I was a king in my world before, but not anymore,
879. tell me O Birbuár, where am I and what is this world?
880. thus Birbuár said: yes I shall answer your questions,
881. but if you do not know already, how come you are an Ayvar?
882. and Alexander replied: I am not an Ayvar, but a stranger here
883. and Birbuár had a weird look upon his face and eyes
884. and this he said to Alexander: but how you got the Charnagút?
885. and Alexander replied back: it is a gift from my father Pilippánút,
886. but I do not know how he got it or made it,
887. but this sword helped me a lot to come here,
888. and discover the truth one by one