+5…

Did I pass 2 weeks already without blogging? I guess! I really didn't count the days. I've been under pressure lately which made me unable to do much even with editing my old photos. The largest portion of this stress has passed (somewhat) already, but some deal of it remains still. More about that a bit later.
I don't think I will be posting much in this post except for an announcement, and as I go on, I might think of posting a bit further about some of my latest edits!

Announcement

I think I've mentioned in previous posts about new uploads to Mostphotos. So, here it is, I've uploaded about 3 new panoramas (plus 2, adding to 10 panoramas uploaded months back). So, the total right now is at 15 panoramas at large sizes, suitable for printing as fine art pieces. I think I didn't post much about these extra 5 panoramas, so I'll try to do so here right now. 

Failakan Sunset

Earlier (as in last month or before!) I've added Failakan Sunset  to Mostphotos (exclusively), and it is an old (half-way) panorama shot over a ramp, which is used to slide boats to the water, on Failaka island. It was taken in 2012. I say "half-way" here as it was not a full panorama, but merely 2 rows was shot, and the third one was not shot (probably because at that time it was getting pretty dark on this depopulated island). Originally done in HDR, but this time it is done with singles of RAW files; All edited and stitched. Of course the colors are edited here and in fact they caused me a problem because when merging layers the appearance of the image would change drastically. I had to re-work the colors after merging (and at 100% zoom to ensure the accuracy of the colors). At 300 dpi, the panorama is close to 102cm by 36cm. I think if I was to print this panorama I would print it on a glossy material, preferably metal. Just one must be careful about the reflections from light fixtures. 

Entry
(Slí Isteach)

Then I added Entry, or as I like to call it in Irish: Slí Isteach. This is a panorama shot in 2014 inside a little defensive tower in the remains of Aughnanure castle in Oughterard, Co. Galway. It was my 3^rd time in Ireland, and my 2^nd time in Aughnanure (the first being in 2009). Generally speaking, this projection is relatively new for this panorama. I did many projections and styles out of this panorama, but this is the first time I do a simple vertical one like this, and centering it at the door. At 300 dpi, this panorama is almost 33cm by 75cm. I had to crop quite a portion to balance the image here and remove unnecessary or incomplete details. I would consider printing this on glossy metal but one has to be careful with the lighting surrounding this; Otherwise it would turn just like a reflective mirror with such dark areas. If one would want to go safe with this one, matte never hurts anyone!

Solar Towers

Then, we have Solar Towers, which took me quite some time to put the keywording for, and I'm not sure why. I think I was passing through some "mind-boggling" phase or something. Anyway, I did the keywording after all and here it is. Of course this is an old panorama and it was done in HDR before but this time, like the rest in this series, it is stitched out of single RAW files. The projection here, though, is the new thing as I didn't do such a projection before out of this panorama specifically. I had some struggles of course with the tripod and its shadows (like in the original) and I had spent quite some time fixing it. At 300 dpi, the size is about 42cm by 76cm. I tend to think that glossy printing of this one would add to the vibrancy of the blue tones and adds more overall contrast.

Beyond Abzu

I rolled back in time and checked some of these winter adventures I did back in 2012, and found some worthy stuff (but with a great deal of post-processing work and fixing), such Beyond Abzu here. Beyond Abzu was one of my first night panoramas and I still remember that cold winter night when my feet got frozen by the cold water. As the processing went on, the general tint of the image got green and that inspired a sense of mystery in me, hence the name Abzu (also Apsu) which is the name of the primitive waters, supposedly, from which the world was created in Sumerian myths. In some way, the whole surrealism in this panorama was pointing to that meaning in my head so I gave it that name. At 300 dpi, the panorama is about 37cm by 85cm, and I would go with a glossy print for this one though I would fear for the level of noise here to be exaggerated. I worked on cleaning the noise moderately because there is a limit, after which details might disappear. However, this panorama still bear some dark aspect and dark areas might work as mirrors in glossy prints,specially metallic ones. But I would imagine it would be so vibrant if printed on metal!

Return to Nammu

Lastly, there is Return to Nammu which I consider like Part-2 of Beyond Abzu. In time, these two panoramas are not far off; Both were shot in the same winter, and both in January of that year. However, with Return to Nammu, the sky was a bit darker than in Beyond Abzu specifically because I shot this facing the sea and the moon and the city lights were relatively further away. This allowed for some star constellations to appear in the sky in the original shots and here I tried to process the panorama and clean the noise without touching the stars. Thus, they appear in the original panorama, despite being shot within the vicinity of the city, but only when zoomed in at 100%. Unlike Beyond Abzu though, this one looks quite colorful, and yet mysterious a bit because of the dark night element and the stars, and that moon that shines like a rising sun (but in the middle of the night!). At 300 dpi, the size is about 85cm by 38cm. Print-wise, I guess it would do good in glossy as well as matte. The green hue here, as I see it, would be a vibrant one on a glossy media, specially a metallic one. 

Well, this is for now 5 new uploads to my Mostphotos, which are exclusive to Mostphotos. The links are up there to visit the profile or the specific images, in case you are reading this and wish to get one of these.
My capabilities right now are not quite aligned to provide such printing services and shipping, so I let these images to be purchased on their own as big original files in JPEG format to be printed on whatever the client would like.

Finale

Well, probably I can't get on so much with this post but I believe the announcement above and the details mentioned are just about enough in length for this post; Let's not make it longer!
I am currently on a leave from work for 2 weeks but not for resting or fun, but rather for stress and tracking. After a long wait, I've finally received my "disability certificate" which took a bit more than 2 weeks actually, and finally I was ready to submit my request for a grant of medical retirement from my workplace. But things weren't easy as I hoped for; Suddenly, solving a problem 2 or 3 more problems would occur and some more responsibilities regarding my work are added to the mix, which made every single passing day count. As I'm typing these words, I've finally submitted my papers by email (after a little adventure in going to the new campus, my future workplace supposedly) and a recent phone call confirmed to me that my papers had been signed and ongoing in the process. I just hope the big part of this is over with just before my two-week leave ends. Bureaucracy is not in a friendly terms with my time.
For this reason, and because of all of that stress, I don't think I would be blogging on a regular basis, but surely I will try as much as I can, at least once every other week. Who knows, maybe by the next blog post here, I would be completely free…

Announcement: MostPhotos…

Well, this is another short post of some sort. I want to announce something and in fact I'm barely having the time to type this! Things just started to get busy suddenly! Home, work, health... mood swings, you name it. With all this mess, some ideas had been building up in my head, and I will talk a little about them down below. But first, with the announcement.

Announcement

As I've posted some announcement in my previous short post, here is another one and this time for something a bit more than just stock photos.
I'm actually providing some of these new panoramas that I've been "re-making" with their original size at the time of stitching. What does that mean? Well:

Typically when I set my images to be stitched and make a panorama, the stitcher would take the original sizes of these images by default, and the resulting image by default would be somewhere around 22k pixels wide! However, when I stitch, I reduce the size to about 10k pixels wide, and from there I do even minimize the size further usually before uploading to the stocks because usually such websites do have a size limitation.
Right now, since MostPhotos does not have a cap on the size, I've decided to upload these panoramas at their 10k pixels wide size and put them in a special gallery on MostPhotos for sale. They would be perfect for large prints, being up to 86cm wide (or more), that is about 2.82 ft, at 300dpi. Meaning, the size can still be enlarged further with proper DPI reduction, if needed.

So far, 10 panoramas had been uploaded to MostPhotos and hopefully more to come. I've been spreading the word across social media and now, in this post. In case you would like to follow up, you can also mark this page and check if any new panoramas been added. Worth noting that these panoramas are exclusively available on MostPhotos, alone.

A glance at the gallery in MostPhotos. Clicking each thumbnail would provide more info about the panorama.
Click to enlarge.

Now, the reason I'm doing this is for the technical (and financial) hardships that I'm having concerning printing and sending prints (even before COVID). Things are worse now because of COVID of course (specially with technically a non-existent postal services here and relying heavily on private couriers which charge much). Thus, I've decided that maybe I should offer those for sale with a suitable price online for people appreciating arts, and leave the choice of printing (and sizing) to them, instead of doing the whole work of printing and sending. As noted, this is a first batch I would say, and hopefully more will be added when I get the chance to make some more (I have some ready but wouldn't upload them for various reasons, but only display them, on smaller sizes).

Finale

Well, as you can see above, I've been busy with the issue of creating panoramas (and still with that in fact), and in the same time busy with new ideas that I'm still trying to figure out how to apply them. In addition to that, I will be preparing another batch of single shots to be uploaded to stocks (mostly some old shots re-processed).
All this work with preparing photos for the stocks makes me think seriously of checking for some "keywording" software to aid me with generating relevant keywords instead of thinking about them from the top of my head! I do use some websites already but I'm guessing that they are not too advanced. That's another story for another time.
On the other hand, I've been surprised by 123RF, which rejected ALL of my previous 25 uploads! The reasoning for 90% of them (if not 99%) was set to "Pixelation" or "Pixels". I deem this completely a non-sense, as I know that the images that I've uploaded were reasonably sharp and clean. Setting this reasoning for mostly all the images makes me think that there was another reason behind the rejection, probably not technical at all. Meanwhile, Dreamstime did accept about 11 out of these 25 uploads (and these 25 are also available on MostPhotos).
February is on the way, and I'm trying hard to squeeze my mind for some ideas regarding my annual shot for Retinitis Pigmentosa; If you are reading this and don't know, February is named as Retinitis Pigmentosa Awareness Month. I used to do a shot every year since 2017. For this matter, I'm trying a bit of brainstorming using some websites for random word generating in order to spark something in my head, beside surfing Pinterest but so far no chain of thoughts had been established yet.
On the other hand, some ideas visit my head concerning drawing inspiration from my daily (or semi-daily) readings for Quran; A habit that part of a resolution I've made some years back and got fulfilled during COVID and lockdown till this very day (and so far I've read the whole of the holy book for 3 times and doing the 4^th nowadays). That would not be an easy task of course, specially when trying to avoid modeling (which brings me back to selfies). Anyway, since I read one part of Quran almost every day (Quran is divided to 30 parts), then initially the idea is to create 30 images, with each image being inspired by some line I do read in each part. I don't see results pretty soon for this but let's say it's a goal in itself and to be achieved with an open time limit. But I do have to put this aside a bit and focus on my Retinitis Pigmentosa project for now.
Now, all I'm praying for is, some peace of mind, and less mood swings, and yet further some quiet place. Maybe I would be able to recollect some of my thoughts that way…