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no “www”,  just  emhotep.net

Let Me Know What You Think!

Still some bugs, but I’ve been working on it all night, and I still have some tweaking to do to it.  If you find any issues, please post about them here or there!

This blog has been a pilot project from day one, as stated in the This Site tab.  The intent was to use the free account to learn how to use the WordPress software, then when I felt ready, launch the actual project on its own server.

Well, the pilot project is wrapping up…

I will keep this brief, but I want to give a quick explanation of what I have been up to, and what to expect from the new direction Project Em Hotep is taking.

Several weeks ago I found a great third party server (JustHost.com) to host my WordPress software.  The price was right and it has all of the bells and whistles I was looking for.  I found an awesome looking theme (theme in WordPress parlance basically refers to how your blog looks) from the folks over at www.infocreek.com which is free (again, the price was right!) and which I have been seriously tweaking for the last week or so.  You can get a peek of the theme by clicking here, but expect my version of it to be seriously Egyptianized..

So how else will the new website differ from this one?  For one thing the pictures will be larger, but will also load faster.  How did I achieve that?  I don’t want to get too technical here, but basically I am formatting the pictures differently when I upload them.  The body area of this current blog (the part where the articles appear) is 500 pixels wide, but when I upload the pictures I upload them full size, so when you click on an article the full sized pictures are loading, but they are being scrunched into a width of 500 pixels, with the height being relative to size change.  So, for example, if the picture is 1000×1200 pixels, it is compacted to 500×600.  But, before it is compacted the whole picture is loaded.

The body section of the new website is 600 pixels wide, which means the pictures will be both wider and taller, and I have to say, they look pretty darn good.  But they will load faster because I am re-sampling the pictures to the standard 600 pixel width before uploading them, and I am also re-sampling them in such a way that makes the file sizes smaller without any reduction of resolution.  Ok, there is some reduction, but you would have to blow the pictures up to something like 3600% to be able to see the difference.

If your eyes are glazed over by the above, just remember this:  Better, larger pictures, less time to load to your screen.

I have also kicked the font size up just a notch so your eyes don’t really glaze over with the wider paragraphs.  So add easier to read to bigger pictures, faster loading.

So some of the articles I have copied from here to there had to be reformatted a little.  And some of the articles had to be reformatted a lot.  When I first started this project the idea was to present the pictures I took while in Egypt with a minimum of text.  But the format of my articles have grown over these past few months.  What started as simple photo essays have turned into full-blow articles with a Further Reading section!  I guess this was to be expected.  I am a very amateur photographer.  But I am a professional writer and sociologist with a heavy background in history (I was a history/sociology double major until well into my Junior year of undergrad).  So its only natural that my desire to write and inform would come to the front.  As Michael Corleone says, “You are what you are.”

So another thing I have been up to is re-writing several articles.  In particular, Highlights of the Giza Plateau, and The Giza Plateau Revisited have been combined and then redivided into eight (yes, eight!)  individual articles–one on the Giza Plateau itself, two separate articles about the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, an introduction to pyramids in general, individual articles on each of the three main pyramids, and a short bit on the Mena House.  The format I am going with is more along the lines of what I used in the articles about Coptic Cairo and the Mosque of ibn Tulun.  The Shemsu’s Voyages articles will be stand-alone at the new site rather than being attached to other articles.

I will also have a bit of a local take.  I have not mentioned my locality before, but I live in Louisville, Ky, and as a way of adding some local appeal I will be offering articles on things such as good restaurants for finding Egyptian Food, anything Egyptian that passes through our local museums, and a list of classes each semester offered by our local universities (Go Cards!!!) that have anything to do with Egypt or Egyptology.  I will also be blogging about news regarding Egypt–not so much politics as who dug up what and where.

So yeah, we are growing.  Any questions?

What is the address of the new website? 

I am not going to announce that until I am ready to fully roll it out.

When will it be ready? 

I am guessing in about another week or so.  The announcement will be pretty hard to miss.

Will I still maintain this site? 

No, all new articles will be posted to the new website only.  I will leave this site up for a few weeks to re-route people to the new site, but after that I will be pulling this site down.  WordPress.com is very kind to offer free space for blogs, but to just park a dead site here is lazy and taking advantage of their kindness. 

Will the new site drive you crazy with lots of pop-up windows and flashy ads? 

No, if I decide to put ads on the new website they will be very low-key and off to the side.  The decision to go to a third party server was not in order to turn this into a big money making venture, but simply to give me total freedom in designing the look of the site rather than having to chose from a limited set of cookie-cutter unchangeable themes.  Any ads will be to promote local businesses somehow tied in with the subject matter, or to help defray the costs of the server.  But no pop-up ads, annoying flashers, or ads that suddenly blurt a sales pitch out of your speakers.  I hate that stuff, too.

Well, that’s about it.  I am pretty psyched!  The next post I make to this blog should be the announcement of the new address, and you can look for it in less than a week.

Thanks to everyone who has been following my progress here.  As of now we have had more than 600 hits (visits) to the pilot project, and that is without doing any promotions, mentioning the site on other related websites, or even optimizing to search engines.  That is very encouraging indeed.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE.

(You will be redirected to the article on the new website)

This article looks at the history of the Coptic Quarter with special attention given to the Churches of Saints Sergius and Mary, and the Synagogue of Ben Ezra.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE.

(You will be redirected to the new site)

For seven centuries the Citadel was the seat of Islamic supremacy in Egypt.  Like the pharaohs of old, the sultans built magnificent symbols of power and piety, pushed the boundaries of architecture and engineering, and wrote their history in stone and gold.  If the pyramids are the most obvious symbols of ancient royalty, the Citadel of Salah al-Din is clearly the emblem of the Muslim dynasties.

This article will take you around the Citadel, behind its walls, and into the heart of its most sacred space.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE.

(You will be redirected to the new site)

This article has been expanded and re-written as a series of articles about the pyramids and the Giza Plateau.

Click HERE to be redirected to the Giza Plateau category on the new site.  You’ll be glad you did!

To read the rest of this article, click HERE.

(You will be redirected to the article on the new website)

This article covers what I have learned about selectively adjusting different parts of photographs by taking advantage of layers, level adjustment, and judicious cropping.

Picking and Choosing

For reasons I have yet to figure out, a lot of the pictures I took in Egypt have a slightly dark almost overcast look to them.  I am assuming this may have something to do with my camera trying to adjust to how intense everything was.  Between the sun, the sand, and the reflective tones of pretty much everything there, Egypt is a pretty bright place.  This gives most of my pictures a sort of hazy look which I try to correct before posting.

This is the picture in its untouched form. See how overcast it looks?

The problem I have been running into is that when I brighten and sharpen things up, the sky tends to take on a grainy, sometimes even pebbly look.  I don’t mind having a hazy sky.  I think that kind of gives a feel for how blasted hot it is over there.  The soft blues and lavenders of the Saharan sky contrast great with the golden hue of the statues, structures, and landscape.  So the issue is how do I keep the soft texture of the sky while sharpening everything below the horizon?  If only there was some way to selectively adjust some parts of the picture while leaving others untouched..

Note: If you are scratching your head and saying “Grainy?  I can’t tell the difference between the sky on the left (below) and the sky on the right,” try clicking on the picture.  To include the pictures in the post I have to reduce them to fit the format of the Pressrow theme.  This improves the resolution, which reduces the effects of the grainy appearance.  So if you can’t tell without clicking on the picture, why bother?  Artistic integrity!  That, and the fact that the picture should be judged based on how it looks at full size, not how it looks when reduced for publishing in the blog.  In some blogs this is not an issue, but the intent of the blog in development is to place equal (if not more) emphasis on the appearance of the photographs.

Before and after adjusting. Note how grainy the sky is on the right.

Fortunately, with Paint.Net there are ways to selectively work with different parts of a picture.  This little tutorial will take you step-by-step through the process of correcting the brightness and contrast of an outdoor photograph while leaving the sky untouched.  Since the Sphinx pictures received the most clicks in the last post, I will be using another shot of the Sphinx as the example in this tutorial.  I aim to please!

There are probably other ways of doing this, but using layers allows you to do tons of things with a photograph, so they are worth becoming familiar with.  The way I solved the above/below the horizon issue was by combining two layers of the same picture.  With the top layer I cut out the sky and make my adjustments to what is left.  The bottom layer is left alone, so when I combine the two the end result is the unadjusted sky over the adjusted landscape.  

Part A:  Setting Up the Layers

1. Load the image you want to adjust into Paint.Net
2. In the Layers window, click on the Properties button in the lower right corner. 
3. Change the Name of the layer to “top” and click OK. 
4. In the Layers window, click on the Duplicate Layer button.  There should now be two identical layers in the Layers window, both named “top.” 
5. Click on the lower of the two layers in the Layer window.  The lower layer should now be highlighted in blue.
6. In the Layers window, click again on the Properties button and rename the lower layer to “bottom.”  Click OK.  You should now have two identical layers, one named “top” and the other named “bottom.”
7. In the Layers window, click on the “top” layer so that it is highlighted.
8. Now click the Add New Layer button at the bottom left side of the Layer Window.  You should now have three layers in the Layer window—a blank layer at the top (probably named Layer 3), the “top” layer, and the “bottom” layer.
9. If the blank layer is not highlighted then click on it so that it will be.  Click on the Properties button again and rename the blank layer to “middle” and click OK.
10. Now click on the “top” layer so that it is highlighted, then click on the Move Layer Up button at the bottom of the Layers window.  You should now have the “top” layer at the top of the Layer window, the “bottom” layer at the bottom, and the blank “middle” layer in the middle.  Makes perfect sense, huh!

 

We are now going to set up the middle layer to serve as a neutral background to the top layer.  We are going to be cutting away large sections of the top layer, and the middle layer will help by showing a nice bright color to indicate where we have cut part of the picture away.  I like to have a color rather than a transparent background because any spare pixels you might miss in your “cleaned up” section will show up better against a bright color than it will against the default checker-board that serves as the background when cutting with a transparent background.

11. Ok, this is important so follow closely.  Click on the “middle” layer to be sure it is highlighted.  Now go to the Colors window and select a color to serve as the background for the “top” layer.  I use turquoise because it shows up well in the background.
12. Once you have selected a color from the Colors window, go to the Tools window and click on the Paint Bucket tool.  Once you have done this, making sure the middle layer is highlighted in the Layers window, click on the picture in the main window with the Paint Bucket tool.  If you do this correctly, then nothing will change in the picture itself, but the middle layer in the Layers window will turn the color that you selected for the background.  If instead part of your picture turned the background color, you messed up!  Click Undo and repeat this step making sure that the MIDDLE layer is selected in the Layers window!  

Part B:  ‘Scuse Me, While I Crop the Sky!

With apologies to Mr. Jimi, in this section we will be cutting out the sky in the top layer so we can make adjustments to the landscape.  As we cut away the top layer, the background color from the middle layer will shine through, making it easy to track our progress.  To make things easy, we will be using the Magic Wand tool where we can.

1. In the Layers window, click on the top layer, making it the active layer.
2. In the Tools window click on the Magic Wand.  The idea here is to use the Magic Wand to select as much of the sky as possible, without selecting anything beneath the horizon.  This involves playing around with the Tolerance level, and you will probably have to make a couple sweeps.
3. For this picture I set the Tolerance to 29% for the first sweep and then clicked in the upper left corner of the picture.  Since every picture is different, you will have to play around with both the Tolerance level and where you click in your picture.  The most important thing is that you only select the parts that you want to cut out of the top layer, which in this case is the sky.  If anything else is selected, then just click the Magic Wand somewhere else and try again.
4. Once you have selected a part of the picture that you want to cut out, just hit the delete key on your keyboard.  The selected section will disappear, exposing the bright color of the middle layer beneath.  I had to readjust the Tolerance lower each time I selected a new section to cut. 
5. After you have cut away as much as you safely can using the Magic Wand to make your selections, Zoom the picture up to 400-500% and clean up the rest with the Eraser tool.  The end result should have nothing but the background color showing in all of the sections you want to cut away, which in this instance is the sky.

Little by little the sky melts away.

In the next section we will do our color and light adjustments  

Part C:  Adjusting the Color Brightness and Contrast in the Top Layer

1. To begin this section, make certain that the top layer is still highlighted in the Layers window.  If it isn’t then click on it now to make it the active layer.
2. Click on the Adjustments drop-down menu at the top of Paint.Net and select Levels.  This will bring up the Levels Adjustment window. 
3. There are two sides to the Levels Adjustment window—Input and Output.  I have only had to use the Input adjustments for my pictures, so that is all we will deal with.  You will notice that there are two values and two slides on the Input level indicator.  The top value is the White Point and represents the brightest color that appears in the image.  The bottom value is the Black Point and represents the darkest color in the image. (For more about the Levels Adjustment window click here).  The default values are 255 for the White Point and zero for the Black Point.  I have had the best results with my Egypt pictures setting the White Point between 210 and 245, and the Black Point between 5 and 20.  For this picture, I set the White Point at 220 and the Black Point at 10.
4. For your image, try different combinations of White and Black Points until you get just the right level of brightness and contrast you are looking for.  When you are done, click OK in the Levels Adjustment window.  

Part D:  Finishing the Image

We are now ready to combine the layers of our image!

1. In the Layers window, click on the middle layer to highlight it.
2. With the middle layer active (highlighted), click on the Delete Layer button in the Layer window.
3. With the middle layer gone, the bottom layer is now visible behind the top layer.  The landscape which you adjusted in the top layer should be covering the unadjusted landscape from the bottom layer, leaving the exposed sky from the bottom layer showing through.
4. Click on the Image drop-down menu at the top of Paint.Net and select Flatten.  This should combine the top and bottom layers in the Layers window into one layer, probably called “Background.”



Left: Untouched. Middle: Entire pic is adjusted. Right: Adjusted but with original sky.

Congratulations!  You are ready to save the image.  The above image shows how the picture looked before adjustment, how it looks when the entire picture is adjusted (note the grainy sky), and how it looks with just the landscape adjusted and the sky preserved.

The finished product

Doesn’t the above finished product look so much better with the landscape, Sphinx, and pyramids brightened up and sharpened, but with the nice hazy sky left intact?  I thought so too.  And there is a lot more you can do by playing around with both Layers and Level Adjustment.  You can cut the image into as many layered sections as you wish and perform different effects on each before combining them.  You can also adjust specific colors in the Level Adjustment tool.

Taste the colors!

For the next post I think I am going to stick with Cairo.  Some street scenes might be nice.  And for the first time I am going to include some of my reflections from my travel journal, Shemsu’s Voyages!

Em hotep!

Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.

Click HERE to be redirected to the Giza Plateau category on the new site.  You’ll be glad you did!

So instead of mothers, I decided to put up a few pictures of children.  Of course I will have my latest installation of my ongoing odyssey with blog designing, but feel free to skip that part.

For the most part I’ve been doing offline behind-the-scenes type stuff recently.  I am still scanning in photos and sorting them out.  I think I am on the other side of the learning curve now with photo editing.  I am not quite so obsessive-compulsive about pixel editing.  I have been doing some honest re-evaluations of some of the photos I have edited, and to be honest, I can get results that look every bit as good in about a third of the time.  I had been blowing them up 800% for editing and a lot of the changes I was making were pretty much invisible at regular resolution!

I have also discovered that I need to be more flexible about my 1200×800 pixels rule.  I am sticking withthe 3×2 ratio, but some pictures will be more like 1350×900, or 1100×733.  I was having to do some awkward cropping, and have discovered that at least for now preserving the ratio is more important than staying consistent with size.  That’s about it for my progress report, so on to the pictures!

This young lady and her trusty stead were photographed in front of the mortuary temple that is part of the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara.  As the water jug implies, she was about some errand which has now been immortalized on the Web.  The temple, despite its modernistic, almost art deco appearance, is one of the older structures in Egypt.  And please don’t forget, if you want to see any of the pictures in their full size, just click on the image.

The young men below were photographed from a boat near Elephantine Island, as the characteristic large round boulder in the foreground will attest.  The large castle-like building in the background is the Mausoleum of Shah Aga Kahn, one of the more recent buildings in Egypt, comparatively speaking (50 years old is very young by ancient standards).

The picture below was shot at a rug factory near Cairo.  There was a showroom up front with some of the largest most intricate silk Persian-style rugs you can imagine.  In the back were the looms where the rugs were made, and where these young ladies were photographed.

The young man above hammed it up for the camera while walking with his sister on an Aswan street.  This picture was snapped just in the nick of time because within a fraction of a second of clicking the shutter he bolted off after a cat that seemed as eager not to be caught as he was to catch it.

The scene below was captured while on the way back to Luxor after a day trip to Abydos.  Talk about green technology..  This goat-driven waterwheel has changed very little in design for thousands of years.   The wheel pulls water up from an underground source and feeds it into irrigation canals.

This next picture was taken one morning on a Cairo street.  The combination of blues really caught my eye.  Too bad the shot is blurred, but I still like it.  There is a softness to it and you can almost feel the cool breeze left over from the night before.

The lad below was part of the crew of a felucca that gave me my first glimpse around Elephantine and Kitchener Islands.  His father and younger brother constituted the rest of the crew.  Feluccas are small wooden sailing ships that look pretty much the way they did centuries ago and may be found cutting the waves from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea to the southernmost reaches of the Nile River.

That’s it for now.  And to be honest, I am glad I have a few extra weeks to prepare for the Mother’s Day exhibit!  I need to do a little more research to make sure that the goddesses I include really were Mother Goddesses.  Leave it to me to include someone notorious for eating her young in a Mother’s Day tribute..  Myths can be a bit violent at times.

So far I have avoided the stereotypical touristy pictures of the Pyramids, but no more!  The next post is going to be Giza Fever all the way.  I’ll try to keep your interest with some cool angles and perspectives, but get ready to get your Sphinx on.

Copyright 2009, all rights reserved.