... To our Heroes & Angels
I wish to dedicate this photo to the medical & healthcare professionals of our hospitals (and the ambulance people, who are at the very first line). They are facing the Covid-19 emergency at the best of their professional and humane possibilities, wrestling with limitations in supplies, lack of ventilators, ICU beds, personal safety devices, and all sorts of other difficulties, of which I am able to imagine only a small part.
Covid-19 infected people are cut off from their relatives (who are quarantined at home as soon as the patient has been found to be positive), so the psychological side of the hospitalisation can be almost as hard as the infection itself. Cell phones help a lot, of course - and, in case, WhatsApp can compensate for difficulties in speaking (e.g. because of the oxygen mask). However the feeling of loneliness is very strong, an almost physical sensation - you feel lost, overwhelmed. At the mercy of events.
Physicians and nurses could restrict themselves to the management of the health threat in itself - after all, who could blame them for this? They are justly called heroes for their dedication. But they are aware of your psychological distress and do not restrain themselves... They offer you their sympathy and humane support. I can only begin to imagine the additional weight of this burden at the end of their by now exhausting shifts (when they return to their beloved ones being so worn-out and worrying about even the remotest chances to infect them). Note that I do not say such things in principle: I have experienced this closeness, which greatly helped me to rise up. So they are not "simply" heroes - they are angels as well: angels at work in a hell of spherically symmetrical pain, where you can see two people slip away in a handful days, and that only in your own hospital room.
I am deeply moved when I think of them. I am quarantined at home now - effectively out of hell - but I cannot forget that they are still in the trenches of the struggle against this multifaceted infection and its often deadly effects, so I often phone the ward to ask them if they are faring well and to renew my gratitude and moral support. So I heartily offer this image to them: to those who supported me* and to all the others who are doing the same for so many other infected people.
More than three years later I am re-reading this text, after the ebbs and flows of the pandemic and of the conspiracy theorists and no-vax, and biosimilars, I confirm every single word. I would write the very same text right now. Maybe in uppercase.
* Sadly, I cannot even recall their faces, since the safety devices made almost all of them an indistinct blur of facial features. Of course I was able to discern whether they were male or female, or to recognise someone taller than the average; however I can not forget their unique voices.
This image has been unhearted from my Rosolina Mare archives (June 2016) (see the album Rosolina sunrise). That surprigingly beautiful location gifted me with a couple of sunrise sessions; the first was the most fruitful one: a powerful thunderstorm had stormed the night, leaving behind an incredible cloudscape. Moreover the low tide revealed harmonious wavy patterns carved in the sand by the flow of the gentle waves.
As I walked southwards the beach resorts soon ended and I found myself walking along an expanse of wild beach with beautiful dunes and stranded driftwood here and there. This image depicts one of the innumerable views I was gifted with that morning.
I have obtained this picture by blending an exposure bracketing [-1.0/0/+1.0 EV] by luminosity masks in the Gimp (EXIF data, as usual, refer to the "normal exposure" shot), then I added some final touches with Nik Color Efex Pro 4. RAW files processed with Darktable.
The look & feel of this photo notwithstanding, here there is only an intensive work of blending of the bracketed photos (uncharacteristically, much of this work has dealt with the overexposed shot). No Orton or similar effects; just the inverted RGB blue channel technique described by Boris Hajdukovic as a final contribution to the processing of the foreground. While this technique (which, its imposing name notwith standing, is pretty simple to implement) often holds interesting results in full daylight landscapes, its effects on a low-light capture (e.g. a sunrise) are utterly unpredictable, so at the end of my workflow I often give it a try to ascertain its possibilities.
... To our Heroes & Angels
I wish to dedicate this photo to the medical & healthcare professionals of our hospitals (and the ambulance people, who are at the very first line). They are facing the Covid-19 emergency at the best of their professional and humane possibilities, wrestling with limitations in supplies, lack of ventilators, ICU beds, personal safety devices, and all sorts of other difficulties, of which I am able to imagine only a small part.
Covid-19 infected people are cut off from their relatives (who are quarantined at home as soon as the patient has been found to be positive), so the psychological side of the hospitalisation can be almost as hard as the infection itself. Cell phones help a lot, of course - and, in case, WhatsApp can compensate for difficulties in speaking (e.g. because of the oxygen mask). However the feeling of loneliness is very strong, an almost physical sensation - you feel lost, overwhelmed. At the mercy of events.
Physicians and nurses could restrict themselves to the management of the health threat in itself - after all, who could blame them for this? They are justly called heroes for their dedication. But they are aware of your psychological distress and do not restrain themselves... They offer you their sympathy and humane support. I can only begin to imagine the additional weight of this burden at the end of their by now exhausting shifts (when they return to their beloved ones being so worn-out and worrying about even the remotest chances to infect them). Note that I do not say such things in principle: I have experienced this closeness, which greatly helped me to rise up. So they are not "simply" heroes - they are angels as well: angels at work in a hell of spherically symmetrical pain, where you can see two people slip away in a handful days, and that only in your own hospital room.
I am deeply moved when I think of them. I am quarantined at home now - effectively out of hell - but I cannot forget that they are still in the trenches of the struggle against this multifaceted infection and its often deadly effects, so I often phone the ward to ask them if they are faring well and to renew my gratitude and moral support. So I heartily offer this image to them: to those who supported me* and to all the others who are doing the same for so many other infected people.
More than three years later I am re-reading this text, after the ebbs and flows of the pandemic and of the conspiracy theorists and no-vax, and biosimilars, I confirm every single word. I would write the very same text right now. Maybe in uppercase.
* Sadly, I cannot even recall their faces, since the safety devices made almost all of them an indistinct blur of facial features. Of course I was able to discern whether they were male or female, or to recognise someone taller than the average; however I can not forget their unique voices.
This image has been unhearted from my Rosolina Mare archives (June 2016) (see the album Rosolina sunrise). That surprigingly beautiful location gifted me with a couple of sunrise sessions; the first was the most fruitful one: a powerful thunderstorm had stormed the night, leaving behind an incredible cloudscape. Moreover the low tide revealed harmonious wavy patterns carved in the sand by the flow of the gentle waves.
As I walked southwards the beach resorts soon ended and I found myself walking along an expanse of wild beach with beautiful dunes and stranded driftwood here and there. This image depicts one of the innumerable views I was gifted with that morning.
I have obtained this picture by blending an exposure bracketing [-1.0/0/+1.0 EV] by luminosity masks in the Gimp (EXIF data, as usual, refer to the "normal exposure" shot), then I added some final touches with Nik Color Efex Pro 4. RAW files processed with Darktable.
The look & feel of this photo notwithstanding, here there is only an intensive work of blending of the bracketed photos (uncharacteristically, much of this work has dealt with the overexposed shot). No Orton or similar effects; just the inverted RGB blue channel technique described by Boris Hajdukovic as a final contribution to the processing of the foreground. While this technique (which, its imposing name notwith standing, is pretty simple to implement) often holds interesting results in full daylight landscapes, its effects on a low-light capture (e.g. a sunrise) are utterly unpredictable, so at the end of my workflow I often give it a try to ascertain its possibilities.