Pinholism…

Summer is here, so if you are a person who likes summer, please don't let me encounter you on any platform! It's just the 2^nd week of June and temperatures already getting to, if not exceeding, 50^oC! I had some pleasant short vacation away from work but going back now, after such a holiday, with such heat (and AC problems from time to time) is just so exhausting. Meanwhile, I'm sort of idle with my camera but I'm busy with other things. Might talk about them later. But as promised in my last post, I will talk about another photo which I've created some weeks ago and I didn't want to jam my previous blog post here about it, so I kept it for this week.

Pray

المُقْرِئْ
The Reciter

Some time ago, months ago in fact, I've made a shot with my pinhole cap (or pinhole lens as some like to call it)  picturing myself reading or reciting Quran, opposite to a shiny window. The image is much of a conceptual fine art work instead of the typical expressive sharp image that we, mostly, would expect. This shot was done in a time when I was really working on enhancing the pinhole imagery and trying my best to get it to be as sharp as possible. However, with time, I realized that this is kind of impossible to be done (scientifically) and it would be rather better to work on using this specific look which is created by the pinhole to express a specific mood, and culture. Since the make of The Reciter (it is also one of the rare occasions in which I do name my photos in Arabic actually, because of its nature), I've thought of doing another shot depicting the praying practice (as a Muslim of course) but for one reason or another I really didn't get the time to do it until Ramadhan (and being off with my little vacation) this year. The main problem, though, was to find a suitable location for the shooting; I needed a place with glass that allows so much light to come in, and must be in some good angle in relation to the sun. I guess I've found that good spot in the guest room at home.

المُصَلّي
The Praying

In this room, I had to shoot in the early morning. I did check the room several times but I thought first about some obstacles (some gypsum board wall ) that might block the view if I want to perform the shot in front of the main entrance door to this room. However, all went well in the end (with some tiny bits of cropping and fixing perspective in post-process). Then, we have the problem of the perspective, which was easily solved with my new L-Bracket, which I've attached to the camera body and it allowed me to place the camera considerably stable in portrait position on the ground. The main issue though was the nature of the shoot itself. Metering and taking test shots revealed that I need about 64 seconds. Doing some math and dividing these seconds over the various parts of the typical movements which one do during the prayer, it was about 12 seconds for each. Anyway, I was counting on my own without a timer or anything and the thing didn't really work as some movements were not recorded clearly on the sensor apparently. Thus, and again, I've found myself forced to use the power of blending to merge all the movements - I did several shots with various movements and gestures, and each in 64 seconds. Blending these shots was not an easy task as well and my typical method of blending using Lighten or Darken did not work here. I simply had to change the opacity for various shots and even canceling some shots as well to get the final look as you see it in The Praying. Another critical post-processing point here is trying to make a difference in tones between the prostrating pose and the kneeling-on-the-ground pose, but keeping both gestures or images reasonably "black". It might be noticeable better when the image is enlarged though.
Now, after finishing this image, I'm thinking, again, of a third images for this series even though in the beginning I was thinking that this would be a two-image sequence only and no more; But my mind is still playing tricks and still thinking what I could add to this series (and it must be related to the Islamic practices of course) - Didn't get an answer myself but we'll see. I've been idle with my camera now (specially after some failures) so it would be a good push to get active again.

Finale

Well, I can't emphasize enough how much I'm sick of summer already and it is still June. Sometimes I'm really hating myself for being born in August. I'm already doing project indoors as it is, and now summer is here, then just the thought of going out to shoot anything, day or night, is a No-No.
Meanwhile, despite stopping the astrophotography trend in my brain, there are some good signs, like finding a relatively-cheap equatorial mount or tracker that I can work with but I'm not ordering this now. This would allow me to take longer spans of exposures and get some proper light to the sensor in order to process them properly and show features of the deep sky objects; As all my trials before were nothing more than some constellations and dots in the sky! On the other hand, working with these images was beneficial despite the failures. I've learned new techniques on "stretching" the data out of my images which I might use any time with other types of images and not necessarily with Astro-shots.
Hanging by the ideas, I'm still looking for inspirations among the Andalusian folk songs and I do indeed have some ideas, but when thinking practically, I just get back to "normal" and abandon the whole thing and start thinking again for and about something new. This is is beside thinking about using the pinhole again for a third image to the sequence of Islamic nature, which includes the two images above.
On the other hand, with all the mental struggle here, there is a struggle inside of me trying to push myself and force myself to travel for real despite the hustle and overthinking. It might be a tiresome thing to do but it is essential to get a break before the engine of my mood and my brain breaks down in this place I'm living in. My fuse is getting shorter and shorter. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get myself busier by adding on to my to-do-list, like learning more languages beside Irish on Duolingo. I've added Turkish, German and Russian - and who knows, I might add a 5^th one too! I really wish I can learn many languages with ease; They fascinated me since I was a kid, and now there is some good chances.
Anyway, as I won't be posting in this blog by next week, I'll be busy actually typing a post for my Arabic blog instead about "extracting" gradients from photos and apply them to other photos, and if it is interesting enough I might as well talk about it here. I hear a lot about people selling and others buying such gradients to ease their workflow and such, yet I'm not sure if this is worthy of my time but I'm experimenting and having some artistic fun as well!

Burning…

Things are becoming to overwhelming in this month. I was really going to postpone typing this blog post for another week, but here I am; Trying my best. Things are going slow to stand up again after the rain crisis and my room turning into a swimming pool. There remains some clutter to clear still though. With all of this and that, I'm trying to get my cameras going on again, as well as checking some of the photos in my arsenal to be uploaded to the stocks (and keeping some of them exclusive to some, as well). However, numerous things happening around me and inside me that all leave me just like paralyzed and unable to think clearly or even get the motive to work on anything I like at the current time.
Heavy-weight news are coming one by one, starting now with the change in policies for Flickr, after being acquired by SmugMug. The new change is to take effect in January, and in that time users with free accounts will be limited to 1000 images only (regardless of their sizes) - My account bears more than 2500+ images already. They are planning to delete old images till the limit is met, and thus more than half of my work will be deleted eventually. Registering as a pro-user is not an option as well. back when I used to pay for Flickr for a pro account, it was for $25/month, but now it is for $50/month (some even say it costs more than Photoshop does). For now, I've backed up all my albums on Flickr and compressed them and kept them safe in clouds, and I'm not sure where to go next to show my work. I've posted a Good-Bye note to my Flickr already and I've stopped posting anything new there already. And this happening only when I started to link my images from Flickr instead of posting them here directly, so I think I'm going back to my old methods of posting my photos here as I type my blog posts.

On the other hand, events are taking place in my workplace and some time by the next year, my workplace would be moved to another place. Other people (most of those I know) are excited about it because, as they see it, it is better; Yet, this is not the case with me, as the place is further away from home than the current location, and with me feeling my eyes' weaknesses taking the toll on me, the idea of moving further away to that area makes me gloomy a bit, specially if I would be needing to drive in the dark (winter mornings or rainy days like we are having right now mostly). Needless to say, I'm trying to cope with exhaustion (and failed already) as it is with my workplace now, what would be the situation with a location almost double the distance? And the traffic jams? All that lead me to think seriously of submitting a request for a "medical resignation" for my eyes problem with Retinits Pigmentosa. But then what? I just don't know…
Things are not any better on the personal and home fronts. Even though I didn't do any official diagnosis, but it seems I do have a touch (or maybe more than that) of depression. Mood swings, family affairs, flashbacks... all of that is just not doing any good and I'm really tired.
Usually I keep ranting till the end of the blog post but I couldn't keep it this time as it is at the core of being able to post this in the first place.

Burning

As I was idle with my camera for 2 weeks or more, with all the struggle with my mood, and the rain interference, I've finally managed to raise up and shake my head a bit to do something. Initially, the idea came about first time when I was burning some incense stick in my room (beside burning aromatic oils) to banish away the bad smell after being soaked with rain water in my room. In the mess, I just got perplexed with the view of these smoke lines going out of the incense. This is not the first time I work with smoke in fact, I've played before (burning some tissue paper though to get the smoke heavy and clear) but this time I had different ideas I wanted to implement.

Censer XXI
An old work with smoke photography.

The main idea this time with these burning incense sticks "was" to do a long exposure in combination with flash strokes; It does sound like the stroboscopic functionality, but I'm talking here about a really long exposure, in minutes, for the duration of the burning incense completely. In rough estimation, one of these sticks would need about 30 minutes to burn completely. This essentially was the first impression or idea that occurred to me (and it took me days to get myself to move and do something about it). However, things had to change drastically as I started the practical side of the idea here. Mainly, the idea swept from being a long exposure with stroboscopic effect, to a regular time-lapse-like shooting (frames at specific assigned time) and trying to combine all these, as much as possible, to get an overall effect.

Sample shot from the series

At time of typing this blog post, I didn't proceed with the merging process for all these shots (more than 80 number), but I'm offering here a sample shot.  To get some inspiration, I've checked Pinterest to get some ideas further and I've seen some photographers who did digitally colored their smoke shots, and I think this is what I will be doing even though it is a bit further away from the "authenticity" measure. The Censer series which was done long time ago had been colored using gels and it is definitely to work with. However, I need to think about my choice of colors to overlay over the final image(s), as most of the images of smokes I've seen been colored as a rainbow. You can see from the sample shot as well that I do need to work on my background as well and this black cloth is not suitable here (actually it got brighter as I processed the images to lighten the smoke). I just hope darkening the background would be easier later in the process.

The set used to shoot the incense sticks.

The shooting and its set is a story on its own, starting with my everlasting nightmare: Tables. Even though I got this table from my sister which is higher and with larger area (far better than tea tables I used to work with mostly), I did have this problem in setting everything in proper level, specifically the speedlites with the incense sticks which were pinned to this Styrofoam box. The camera level was also low and I had to bend my back for long times (by the end of the shoot I got a chair though). To add to my hurdles, my 50mm lens is malfunctioning now and I'm not sure what to do about it next. Probably I'll try to fix it if it possible at some workshop if any exists here! For now, I've combined my 20mm Voigtländer lens with a teleconverter which doubles the focal length to 40mm. This did it for now, but the downside is that the aperture cannot go wider than f/7.1 (i.e. the f-number cannot be less than f/7.1) and of course this is not quite useful if I'm planning to do any bokeh effect in the background. I'm checking my options now but I'm so overwhelmed that I think I will keep this for later to see.
Now, to business for those who would like to read what this set above is all about (I'm sure professionals don't need to know what I'm doing here):

• Far left (the silver curtain): This is a car shade I've kept specifically to be used as a reflector. Frankly, probably didn't do much for the shoot here.
• The white box at the center is the Styrofoam which I used to pin the incense sticks.
• The speedlite on the table between the camera and the Styrofoam is connected to the camera by cable and worked as a master without triggering itself. I've used this first to be able to use the HSS (high speed) option and shoot beyond the sync speed because I've been told high speed shooting is required for capturing the smoke. Turned out to be not true and the HSS didn't help at all so I was back to normal sync speed (1/250s).
• The two speedlites (only one obvious in the image) are the main source of light here. I was planning to use one, but then as I wanted to empower the light in HSS mode I've brought in a second one. But then went back to normal sync speed and left the second addition as it is. Took me a while to figure out a suitable technique and finally I've placed a white cardboard behind them and reflected their light from that surface. Their power was reduced as much as possible with the most significant effect; This is mainly to save power as much as possible with long continuous shooting, and to keep the flash light duration as short as possible. Working in Manual mode, 1/8 of power was enough for both. 
• One cardboard was placed between the speedlites and the camera to block any stray light causing flare. Flare was a problem in the beginning and some annoying brightness was present when I started testing and this black "flag" solved the problem, initially.

It was a long shoot made on intervals of 30 seconds for 30 minutes (in addition to some manual shots done after the program on the intervalometer was fully executed). Processing the images in a haste collectively did make the background brighter than it originally was and the lines in the background showed clearly now, so I hope those can be eliminated later as I work on it. Initially and just for fun, I've created this short time-lapse in reverse.

Well, I didn't bother adding an audio. This said and done, I'm still looking for opportunities to do a long exposure using speedlites triggered at specific intervals of time, in stroboscopic manner, and thus creating a multi-exposure-like image in the same frame of these burning incense sticks. It needs a bit of research so let's hope I get the time to do this. I'm doubting that traditional methods would do here and probably controlling the speedlites with a third party device is required here.

Finale

Well, I guess after ranting in the intro of this blog post maybe I don't have much to state here, but I did in fact work on a short poem, which I've called Just Dance:

Just Dance

In whatever land there is to be
long forgone, or beyond many a sea
Dance!
In whatever Heaven there to be
or wherever gone that soul of me
Glance!

Pretty young to handle all the romance
sweet sixteen or eighteen set to dance
Be!
Sleepless nights all there is in the stance
That is the passion and its annoyance
See!

Praying though in distress or through the glee
however the soul of yours is free
Glance!
Solitude, watching is all to be
under the years and tears over me
Now, bye bye,
Just,

Dance

 

The rhyming scheme goes by A-A-B-A-A-B/B-A-A-B-A-A (which seems to be called, partially, Caudate) and with metering as (9,9,1,9,9,1) except for the last stanza, in which this order of meter was broken. I had a real struggle to complete this one though and I was somewhat lost in thought. To tell the truth, I'm not so convinced about it but I had to take it off my back and post it. So far, I got 2 positive feedback despite being clearly hard to understand as someone noted.

Now, it is clear from all these events and all that struggle (and some more to come concerning my cars), I do really need a vacation. A real one, with traveling. I know, I've kept saying this for almost a year now or more and still didn't do anything about it. I just keep asking myself, why can't I just have some rest on my own? 

I need to wind myself now and get ready to do some phone calls (I hate phone calls) to get some insurance work done (and paid) and finish with the annual check up for the cars, with one of them still in the garage for a month now... might be the time to get rid of it but I'm not sure yet. The idea of taking so many decisions all at once successively is just overwhelming that makes me want to go to bed and just sleep. A really long sleep, and giving the world my back with little care, if any…

Belleza Bendita

Today was a day that ran like a train in my life. Beginning with the early morning in the office changing samples and running devices, and then I spent a plenty of time working with photoshop over a photo of one cute girl (no names to be mentioned) that I called, Belleza Bendita. I made a mistake though in the design as I typed "bendito" instead of "bendita." She is a girl from somewhere with latin and italian roots, so imagine the shape! :)
Belleza Bendita means "Blessed Beauty." This is just what I see in her, and the most fascinating thing, in the whole thing, is the hazel eyes.

Later this morning, I had a call again from the Irish embassy asking me to fax some papers. They called me back on Wednesday asking me to do the visa online (which is something I checked for but I didn't find any information in their site confirming that)... however, I had to run here and there and back home to get the papers and sign them then send them by fax from a photocopy shop.

Got lot to do with photos these days, from people and from my own camera. The photo above is a minimized version of the panoramic view that I composed on the seashore Thursday's morning. The play of colors is, of course, made up... don'tell me you didn't figure this out! The actual size is around 3 meters by 1 meter (WxH). I think that would be somewhere around 9ft by 3ft. I wonder why don't they use the metric!!! It's easier!

Beside fixing photos and doing designs with photos, there is a queue of games that is waiting, and that makes me be idle for sure from completing my story. Games have their own priorities! :)

The yield for today is 2 pages of translation. Also, I discovered a new type of mistakes this time! A reptitive number sequences! YUK!
The repetitive sequence of numbers means that the verse is already more than 24 lines somehow, so if we assumed the total number of lines (after the previous mistakes were found) is 2997, I guess the number now would be 2999... well, closer to 3000, the supposed original number! But still, more mistakes to be found I guess...

As I was trying to type something for my story I figured out that the time doesn't help now, so I went on typing this entry instead... hoping that I might be able to do something at home with my story.
I had some thought of living some tiny adventure by trying to go to one of the islands, namely Miskan, where an old lighthouse built by the british still survives there, beside the new one as I read once. I don't know how much does it take to reach that place, but I heard that I can rent one of the boats lying around in some marinas. I need to re-think about it... specially with such a hot weather now.

It's just amazing, that feeling when you make someone smile... and from one second of dispair, you do make them fly... I think being a single man until this moment of my life, is paying back in a form of virtues... despite the devil that lives within me from time to time... Alas! Life, and so shall it go...