This will be the 2nd time for me to attend it as a VR photographer. It was a lot of fun last time I was there and I’m expecting more excitement and more good music.

If you see me (MADEENA360 logo on my back) at SOS vol. 3, come and say hi

Not as a band as my ID suggests, but as a VR photographer covering the event. SOS Music Festival (vol. 2) was a lot of fun. I took good panoramas everywhere (on stage, backstage, front stage) and the music ROCKED!

One of my favourite performers of the day were Jaffa Phonix. These guys are really creative and their energy spreads all over the crowd. They remind me of the Beastie Boys which I am a big fan of.
Photographing an event like this in 360-degrees was tricky: thousands of people, night photography with colour of lights changing on stage every second, finding a good spot. I’ll write a post soon about best practices of VR photographing an outdoor live event.

The VR photos of the festival will be posted first on SOS Music Festival website. I’ll announce it here when they are online. Last but not least, thanks to the peope I met at Sports Plus, the organizers of this event, for making my job easier: Garo, Reem and Nour.

It looks like someone at Google likes me. I gave away my 100 gmail invites  before and now I have more.

First come, first served. Click the ‘comments’ link below and get 1 of the 10 invites i have.

You can see my WWP Transportation entry before the official launch of the website. But my sneak preview is something you can print, cut, stick and keep it on your desk. This is a lot of fun. I’ve included instructions on it so go ahead and download it from here.

Tell me what you think of it. And give me name suggestions for this printed panorama cube. I thought of PanoCube, do you have a better name. Give me your name suggestions by clicking the comments link below.

The WWP Transportation website will be online on the 9th October and this is where you can see my VR image.

Ramadan officially starts today in Egypt. Wishing all Muslims an easy fast and a blessed month.

You’ve come to the right place. I had previously written about giving away Google mail invitations and until today have received 10 requests. I still have 90 to give away.

There is enough for everyone, just click on the comment link below and write me a message. Give me a day or two and I’ll send the invitation to your email address.

UPDATE - 16th October 2006: There are no more Gmail invites to give away.

UPDATE - 30th October 2006: I have more, click here.

Technorati Tags: email, Google

I’ve had those invitations for a while now and didn’t know what to do with them. Then a light bulb moment came to me.

Give them away on my website.

I hear someone saying: “But what is Gmail?”
I tell you 2.7 GB of free email capacity.

All you need to do is click on the comments link below and write: “Gimme Gimme Gmail” or anything you feel like writing. And I’ll send the Gmail invitation to the email you’ve registered.

UPDATE - 16th October 2006: The 100 invitations are now 0. There are no more Gmail invitations to give away.

UPDATE - 30th October 2006: I have more, click here.

I’ve been wanting to revisit the Giza Pyramids and take extensive VR photos of this amazing place. My ambition is to either link it to Google maps or Google Earth so you the viewer to can zoom in into the map and then click on the different points around the Giza Pyramids and see a 360˚ view of the location. Truely as if you were standing there yourself.

So what is stopping me? I need help.

I can handle the VR photography side of it. I have a GPS, so I can pinpoint the exact coordinates of every single VR photo I take. And I live 45 minutes away from the Pyramids. What I need is:

- Link Google Maps to display the locations of the VR photos and link them to the URLs.
- Design a user-friendly and simple interface on a webpage which is not language dependent.

I am looking for one (or more) person who can help with what I have just mentioned. This is not a commercial project. No one is paying me to photograph the Pyramids and I can not afford to pay someone to design and build webpages. My ambition is to share the Pyramids with the World.

People who share my same passion and can help should contact me directly. People who share my same passion but can not help, can write their support to this idea the comments link below.

And for everybody, these are VR photos I took a few years ago of the Pyramids:

- A girl and a boy’s enjoyment with the Pyramids distracted by a camera.
- The Sphinx poses as tourists take hundreds of snap shots.
- On top of one of the smaller pyramids, a view of the Giza Pyramids and Cairo.
- Waleed Nassar’s entry for the 2004 World Wide Panorama .

CAIRO (Reuters) - Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1988 Nobel prize for literature and best known for his Cairo Trilogy, died on Wednesday in Egypt after suffering from a bleeding ulcer, doctors at an interior ministry hospital said.

The 94-year-old Mahfouz, who was the only writer in Arabic to win the prize, had been hospitalised since July 19 after he fell in the street and sustained a deep head wound that required surgery. Read the rest of the article by Summer Said.

More about the Naguib Mahfouz’s life and his works.

VR MAG, a bi-monthly online magazine of what is current in the world of VR photography, has featured me on its ‘Hotlist’.

They had contacted me about a 360 panorama I had taken of a protest in Cairo against the war in Lebanon. After doing a somersault of celebration to be recognized by a publication like this one, I shared with them what happened that day both on a personal and technical level.

You can read about and see my VR photo in issue 26 of VR MAG.