Category: Photography

As I promised, here is an example of a picture of the day before post processing. Here is the post on miskan.com with the picture post processed. I still need to post a guide on good post processing but I have been really busy.

The Scientific Center is one of the coolest looking places in Kuwait, so I would like to know who is the smart guy who gave I don’t know who, permission to build a building right infront of it?

click here for a better view

I just got invited to a flickr group called Horses, Ponies & Foals… why??! Whats worse is I accepted the invite and joined the group!

I take a few shots during the day and at night I post them on Miskan.com. What you don’t see though is how the pictures looked before right out of the camera. I shoot everything in RAW format which basically means the pictures are stored on my memory card unaltered. The pictures aren’t compressed in any way, no white balance is applied, no sharpening, no nothing. Its pure. When I open up the pictures in Photoshop, I have to set up the Raw options before the picture opens up. Its basically a window where I can control various aspects of the picture from brightness and contrast, to exposure and the white balance. It time consuming since I have to open each image and post process it till it looks good. Each one of my raw files are also over 5MB (on older cameras they are twice the size). The advantage is I get to control the settings, not the camera. Most of my pictures are usually shot under exposed because you can always brighten a picture but you can’t darken an over exposed shot. Shooting in RAW also means I am now more picky with my shots, I don’t want to get home and have 50 pictures I need to open and adjust one by one. I just don’t have the time for it nor the computer processing speed to do it quickly. Below is a shot I just took now in the office to give you an example of the importance of post processing.

In this first picture you can clearly see the white’s are grayish, the floor is dull and the whole picture lacks decent contrast.

This picture is the first one but it’s been post processed. I increased the brightness, contrast, a bit of saturation, set the white balance to neon and then proceeded to manually set the white balance till it contained a decent amount of magenta.

So in conclusion, don’t expect to get good pictures if you don’t post process. Remember when in university you took photography? Remember how in the dark you spent time experimenting trying to get the right contrast and shadows etc.. this is the same thing. If you don’t do it right don’t expect excellent results.

update: I think from now on whenever there is a cool shot I upload onto Miskan.com I will post the original unprocessed one here just to show the importance of post processing.

This photo was taken with a hidden camera at Moyie Springs, Northern Idaho. The owner of property noticed foot tracks some weeks earlier and set camera up in tree along path of tracks. This picture was taken from that camera mounted in the tree. It seems that the Bigfoot took a bite of the red fir tree bark. In the original that I have you can clearly see a piece of bark in the air. I circled the bark in the photo.

This is the only close up photo of Bigfoot that I have ever seen. Very large body and face. The original shows the face and teeth in great detail. Very large mouth and teeth. Not sure of the date. I was told a few years ago. There have been many sighting of Bigfoot in the Northern Idaho area near the Canadian border. Very rugged landscape with many mountains. [via]

I uploaded todays picture onto flickr but I am having problems with blogger. I keep getting a 504 Gateway Timeout everytime I go to blogger.com. Sucks. Here is todays picture.

This was todays B-Side for Miskan. I liked this shot because it looked very psychedelic. No photoshop filter of any sort was applied. No mirrors were involved in this picture.

I was chatting with Nibaq today and he mentioned that he might have read somewhere that Flickr was either banned in UAE or the ISP there is doing something to slow down the uploading of photos. So I decided to ask some UAE people on Flickr and this is what they had to say:

manaal says:
no idea….working fine with me.

w6an 3mry says:
it’s not banned but i think they are doing something to block some of the bad photos

Avish says:
:s inshAllah they don’t ban it totally coz i don’t know what i’ll do 🙁

7abo0ob el Emarat says:
la hopefully they wont cuz we all cant live without it 🙂

ZexySamurai says:
I can live without it! ‘_’ Hehehe, but I love it loads so I hope that’s not true…
P.S. the uploading speed is fine with me..

Eneas says:
what’s UAE?

Green Peace says:
it is working fine with me

My brother sent me a link to a girls photoset on Flickr with pictures of her browsing flickr using her PSP. Here is the link.

“Bidding has ended for this item at US $158.50. You were outbid.” My max bid was $151 $156, I would have gone to 160 if I had know it would end there. I hate bidding on ebay, this is why I usually use the buy it now option OR, I use a software called Jbidder to snipe a bid before the time ends. That means I can tell the software to check the bid 10 seconds before the bidding ends and bid over the highest bid. Anyway I was bidding on an excellent condition all black Nikon FE2. Sucks! [Link]

Update: Just realized my max bid was actually $156 not $151!

I feel like getting a 35mm camera. Yeah, people are moving away from film to digital but film does have one major advantage, it allows me to think 10 times before I take the shot, and when I do I would make sure its perfectly framed. Unlike digital cameras, each shot you take costs you money with film so, this will help me make sure the shot I take is the shot I want. With my previous digital camera I would go for a shoot and come back home with 200 pictures with maybe only 10 good ones. When I got my Nikon I told myself that from now on I would think about each shot before I take it and only take it if I know I would want it. In general this new way of shooting has worked, and I have changed my ways, but, I still am careless when it comes to framing. Hopefully getting a 35mm camera will help me get back down to the basics.

I have a few camera’s I am currently looking at:
Leica CM – fixed 40mm lens compact 35mm camera with titanium body and fully manual controls. Price is around $850
Leica Minilux – fixed 40mm lens compact 35mm camera with titanium body but it can’t go manual. Price is around $700
Nikon FM3A – A mechanical SLR (meaning it can work without batteries) with metal body, fully manual controls. Price is around $550 without lens.
Nikon FE2 – A mechanical SLR with metal body, fully manual controls but they stopped making it in the late 80s. Price is around $150 to $200 with lens on ebay.

I am currently leaning towards the FE2 since my parents had the older FE model. Its a very nice compact SLR and its very affordable. The Leica’s though are very tempting but just so damn expensive..

Hi miskan!

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for! Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to 2 years, and your new expiry date is Jan 31, 2007.

2. More capacity! Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends! This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are today.

Kind regards,
The Flickreenies.

Today I had a tough choice for the Miskan project. I had 2 good pictures but in the end I had to choose one. This one is the picture that lost the battle. I shot it today morning while dropping Nat at work. Its a trace from a fighter jet, we get them in Lebanon two at a time and usually accompanied with the breaking of the sound barrier.

I just got an email today from File Magazine telling me another picture of mine was accepted to be part of their collection. The picture this time is one of my favorites and I called it “Mad Robot”. The building in the picture is of the Kuwait Stock Exchange and it was shot while sitting outside at Second Cup. Here is the picture on file magazine [Link]

I just witnessed the strangest thing. There is a new pigeon on the ledge outside my window and he seems like a tough guy. The first thing that grabbed my attention was his hairy feet, like really hairy. Didn’t know pigeons good have hair on their feet yet alone this much. So I was was starring at the pigeons feet thinking what name to give him, when suddenly he started chasing this pigeon. They were both running outside and the hairy feet pigeon was trying to peck the other pigeon with his beak. Finally the second pigeon flew away. Hairy pigeon then proceeded to chase another pigeon! This fucker like chased 6 other pigeons off the ledge until he was the only one standing there. THEN, if that wasn’t enough, their were 2 pigeons sleeping below the ledge, the guy jumped them both! In the end he was the only pigeon left. So I decided to give him the name Zaeem which means chief in arabic. Then when everything went quiet, a super pigeon appeared. This other pigeon which I decided to give the name Rambo started chasing Zaeem. He wasn’t able to make Zaeem fly off but he was able to chase him till he ended up at the far end of the ledge. Now every-time Zaeem comes close to the other pigeons near my window, Rambo chases him back to the far end of the ledge. It’s really fun watching all this. Makes you wonder whats going on in their minds. I also decided to call the toeless pigeon Tobby.

Here is a picture of Zaeem with his hairy feet