Klyment.com - Journal

After dropping Leanna off at her home after my graduation banquet, upon my approach to my home in the deep west of Edmonton I noticed that the street lamps were illuminating the layer of fog along the highway. Furthermore, a near full moon was lighting the clouds to produce an eerie effect. I rushed home to change and come back out to attempt to photograph was I saw. I failed but I managed to catch some other photos along Anthony Henday Drive. To the right you see the reinforced concrete beams and connecting braces of an overpass bridge. Exposure time according to the EXIF information was 30 seconds, F/8, ISO 100 on the S2 Pro. The camera was cable-released and mounted on my tripod, a Manfrott 055Pro w/ a Manfrotto 352RC4 triple axle head. Lens was the Nikon 17-55/2.8 AF-S DX.

Here is a capture from another part of the highway. This photo was taken near ground level around an intersection of 69 Ave. and Anthony Henday Drive. Exposure information was identical to that of the above. The moon illuminated the clouds in the top right of the photo and the street lamps illuminated thin patches of fog. South of White Mud Drive was denser fog but the angling of the hills and lack of safe places to park prevented me from getting a shot. As you can see form the thin streaks of light, some people were still out and about . . . even at about 4am.

To the right is a photo taken from below the bridge construction where I took the first photo in this entry. Camera was set at F/4 and exposure time was 8 seconds. I attempted to do a dark frame subtration from all of these images but since these photos only had random noise and no characteristic hot pixels, dark frame subtractiont techniques actually yielded a noisier image. The images were all noisiest in the blue channel and there were noticeable streaks and bands. In fact, I notice these streaks and bands even with shorter exposure times but at ISO 800 and above. Perhaps there is something wrong with the sensor in the camera or perhaps I am just being picky. I'm making it a point to contact Fuji Canada this week regarding these issues. I also need to send in my Balcar lighting units for a compatibility upgrade to improve the interoperability of some of my older lights with the newer control unit.

Saturday, March 26, 2005 was the date of my graduation banquet for my Bachelor of Commerce degree at the University of Alberta. It's obviously not a big deal considering that I could easily be failing all of my classes and still attend. Personally, I found the purchase of the banquet ticket a waste of money and I have the suspicion that a fair bit of the money paid was used to subsidize the alcohol in the hospitality suite of which I did not make use. Anyhow, here are some photos journalizing the event. All photos were taken with the Fuji S2 Pro, Nikon 17-55/2.8 AF-S DX, SB-80DX flash bouncing off the ceiling except where noted. To the left you have a photo I took in an elevator. From left, Chelsea Barron, recipient of this year's Commerce Cup (whatever that is, but congrats to her anyhow), me, Enoch, Allison, and Leanna who's sorta there in the corner. Photo was taken at ISO 400 and lens was set to 17mm.

Here I'm sneaking a photo with one of the most reputable professors in our faculty, Erhan Erkut. He was my professor for BUS 201 which was a course I took in my first year in the School of Business. It was by far the most enjoyable class I have ever taken in my entire academic career and was probably one of the most useful. And check out my swanking new pink and baby blue tie. :-) 17mm.

Here's Leanna posing in the lobby of Crowne Plaza Chateau Lacombe. The seats are actually a nice pink colour but I shifted the white balance so that there would appear to be a green cast over the entire frame . . . looks a lot more interesting this way. :-) No flash, ISO 1600, F/2.8.

To the right is Jen. She claims she hasn't had any more than the wine at our tables to drink . . . I guess she really is normally like this. She is in my MGTSC 488 class and was in my MGTSC 426 class. 488 is a supply chain management course taught by Payman Jula who was our nominee for a sessional teaching award which he consequently won. Congrats to Payman.

Here gapes Mike. I'm not sure why he's making such a face, but it sure looks funny. He has a pair of glasses with tint that looks about as urine-coloured as the liquid in the glass in his hand but he's not wearing them today. Boo. Behind him is his girlfriend of whom I am unable to recall her name. Sorry.

From left: a very small fire extinguisher in a big hole in the wall, a lady I don't know, Sam, and some dude holding a wine bottle of whom I can't remember his name. Anyway . . . onto another photo where I can remember more than three of the five entities portrayed.

Here seated were some of my table mates. From left: Jocelyn, Catherine, Enoch, and Tim. This photo was taken at La Ronde, the revolving restaurant above Chateau Lacombe. Photo was taken with existing light at ISO 1600. Noise Ninja was applied using an automatic profile to the original image as the dark areas of the photo were certainly noisy. The lights in the background are from the city below. La Ronde is on the twenty-forth floor of the hotel if I'm not mistaken. The first three are graduating from business. Tim is doing his residency for medicine. Congratulations to all.

Here is Curt the Banana. I became acquainted with him in my first year of business at the Jasper Park Lodge where we were attending the Rocky Mountain Business Seminar. As usual, it looks like he is having a lot of fun. Cheers, buddy.

Here we have Ryan and some dude outside of the hospitality suite. Ryan was in at least one of my classes before. He's in the Canadian military's reserves and has worked as a teaching assistant in some classes which are usually classified as part of the Operations Management Department. I'm not sure who that other person is but it's interesting to note that he has a drink in each hand.

The photos probably make it appear as though the event was more fun than it really was. Or at least that's how I felt. Apparently Leanna enjoyed herself. I suppose as long as there were people that had fun then the event was justified. However, as with my four years of post-secondary education, I feel that all of this has been, for the most part, a waste of my time.

After trying out Lexjet's Instant Dry Satin Canvas on a friend's Epson Stylus 7600 w/ ImagePrint 6 I discovered that it was probably just Lexjet's profile that wasn't very good. Nonetheless, the purchase of ImagePrint ($3000US-ish for the Postscript version, which I'd need for signage and stuff) is taking a back seat to the prospect of purchasing a GretagMacbeth colorimeter, densitometer and some profile making software like their ProfileMaker 5 Photostudio. I haven't looked up the pricing yet but I've heard rumours that it's around $3000US as well. Problem is that it won't process PostScript. =P The reason why I'm interested in this profiling system is because I'm looking at a bulk feed system from Lyson for their Cave Paint/PhotoChrome ink sets. These ink sets are supposed to increase colour gamut and reduce bronzing and also reduce running costs of the printer as ink can be purchased in jugs. :-P Problem is that they only have colour profiles for their own media and not for anyone else's. There may be value in making my own.

Anyhow, my Lexjet rep has begun the refund process. He's been incredibly helpful and tolerant with my "greeness" with this giant piece of Epson printer and his recommendations for media so far have been excellent (yes, Lexjet's Professional Semi-matte 10mil prints much nicer and has lower glare than Epson's Premium Lustre and my customers have noticed this difference). He's also been very responsive with the interesting quirks of this printer, like how it doesn't like rolls of media which aren't exactly 44" or 24" or some of the smaller sizes . . .

The problems arose with two of my rolls of media from LexJet: LexJet's water resistant printable polypropylene and 3p's FlagTex fabric printable translucent stuff. Both of these rolls come as 42", a couple inches short of the standard 44" rolls. As such, the Epson 9600's photo detector told the printer that the paper wasn't loaded properly as it couldn't detect anything around the last two inches of the roll. My Lexjet rep promptly e-mailed instructions on how to bypass the photo detector sequence so that the printer would print on non-standard rolls. Here's how you do it (copied directly out of his e-mail =)):

LCD Screen-->select type-->printer setup-->select type-->hit paper feed down button til paper (ppr) size check-->select type-->it will say on*-->set the asterisk to off by pressing the cut eject enter button-->press pause-----done.

Looks simple? You're right, it is. =) If you are running an Epson 9600 and have trouble following these instructions feel free to drop me a line asking for help . . . so that I can mock you! =P j/k Seriously, if there's something you don't get as part of these instructions or need more info on how these problems came about feel free to drop me a line or give me a call. =)

Last Saturday Huy suggested that I see his old high school's drama class' performance of "Little Shop of Horrors". I took him up on his offer to allow me to shoot and I didn't regret it. It was a very polished and entertaining performance and, having also seen the performance once on a television broadcast I can honestly say that I enjoyed this performance much more. Photographs from the play are viewable in this gallery.

Even though the lighting was very dim the movement was usually slow enough to freeze action. Many shutter speeds were sitting in the 1/20s to 1/60s range and all were taken at F/2.8 in the 200-300mm equivilent range with the Nikon 70-200/2.8 AF-S VR mounted on an S2 Pro operating at ISO 1600. All shots were batch converted from RAW files and overall, the conversion of the 120 or so photos was done in about half an hour. I used Fuji RAW Converter EX 2.0. Most were toned with standard or hard tone curves and exposure kicked up by half a stop to a stop. Colour was set to high. Sharpening was turned off and I used a Photoshop CS action including two unsharp mask passes at different thresholds for the conversion from TIFF to full resolution, low compression JPEG. Another pass of USM was applied to the web-scaled image before saving for web.

It may seem like a lousy workflow but it worked pretty quickly. I didn't want to use Adobe Camera RAW after seeing what it did to some skin tones (yellow-grey transitions . . . no pretty) and feel that using Fuji RAW Converter EX in the workflow is an acceptable additional expenditure of time.

I think I received a bad roll of canvas. I use two different types of canvas at the moment: Epson's Water Resistant Canvas by PremierArt and LexJet's Instant Dry Satin Canvas. The prints on the LexJet ID Satin Canvas look fine right after being printed but within a couple of hours they all seem to exhibit a green shift and the blacks lighten up noticeably. For example, the print of Leanna that I'm "posing" with in the photo to the left now appears to have a yellow-green cast to it and the blacks are no where near as black as they appear in this photo. BTW, I accidentally had my camera set to "high colour" so everything looks a bit more saturated than it should. Anyhow, this colour shift doesn't appear with Epson's Water Resistant Canvas. Lexjet's canvas was recommended by a Lexjet sales representative and though I remembered asking him to drop this canvas from the order as Epson was giving away free cutter blades with every two rolls of their PremierArt canvas purchased that was 17" or larger, the canvas still managed to stay in the order. I guess I wasn't as explicit as I could have been when saying that I didn't want to even try the Lexjet canvas at this time. Anyhow, I was shipped and billed for the canvas. Beyond this colour shift, the canvas is great but that's a pretty big exception. I'll wait until Monday to see whe my sales rep has to say about this colour shift. I received a call last week from LexJet regarding one of my media rolls having a fault in the coating. It was about the ImagePro Satin 8mil paper. Being kind of curious, I thought I'd try the paper anyway. It worked great . . . no colour shifting, excellent colour and touchability, nice gloss. Perhaps they got the two "satins" confused. =P Perhaps that's the case . . . hopefully. Because the landed cost of this roll of canvas was actually higher than Epson's Premier Art water resistant stuff and it's definitely not performing as well.

More about the print: it's a 20 x 26-ish inch print with 2" borders on canvas. It's a very late Christmas present for Leanna. I intend to stretch the final print once I figure out what's up with this canvas. Sorry for the delay, Leanna.

The Epson Stylus Pro 9600 arrived today. A full blog entry is on its way but I'm posting this interim entry as I am very excited about this new piece of equipment. :-) There are two other similar printers that are available for hire in Edmonton but I am going after a different market than either of these companies. In addition, my cost of materials allows me match pricing with the University of Alberta's Computer Network Services large format printing service which is only available to staff and student and prints on plain paper for prints on rolls wider than 36" and basic coated glossy poster paper for prints 36" wide and narrower and they are using machines which are not designed primarily for true photographic reproduction. My 9600 will be driven by Colorbyte's ImagePrint RIP (raster only) which will allow me to achieve a wider gamut and better colour accuracy (I think), than Epson's driver while using the same archival-quality UltraChrome pigment inks and photographic substrates. It will also allow me to quickly gang and next multiple images for printing and proofing on pieces off larger rolls of paper. More on all of this later and hopefully with some photos.

Shortly after taking our leave from Maurice's birthday Leanna and I went to Churchill Square to experiment with the lighting. We began behind City hall, shooting by the pool. Photos taken with an adapted Hasselblad Zeiss 80/2.8 T* on a Fuji S2 Pro, ISO 1600, wide open w/ sodium lighting.

Moving on we tried a couple of shots in the newly-renovated parts of Sir Winston Churchill Square. Leanna's showing off her new shoes in a colour matching her top. Photo taken while lying on my back shooting with the 17-55/2.8 at 25mm and F/2.8, ISO 1600. Shutter speed probably ended up being about 1/90s. I could have probably gotten away with shooting at 1/45s and ISO 800 or even ISO 400. I'll be more careful next time.

Pssssst! Guess what?!

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. . . I just peed in your thermos . . .

The last good shot of the day . . . or perhaps last good shot before 3am the next day. Leanna braved the wind and cold so I could experiment in the construction corridor covering the sidewalk beside a construction side on the university campus. Ever since they started building on this site I've wanted to shoot in this corridor. It means a lot to me to be able to shoot in it. Thanks, honey.

Photo was shot at ISO 1600 from about 10m away w/ the 70-200/2.8 AF-S VR at 120mm, 1/30s, vibration reduction on and a huge amount of white balance shifting in Fuji RAW Converter EX 2.0. Perhaps we can shoot in it when it's warmer and differently lit. Thanks, sweetie!

After having supper with Leanna's family to celebrate her father's birthday, Leanna and I headed over to Eastbound in Oliver Square for Maurice's birthday party. Maurice is a hair stylist and makeup artist with whom I have worked together on some shoots. He also models and . . . stuff. Lots of familiar faces were there, including those pictured to the right. From left, Rachel (met her Saturday, not a familiar face ), Tannie, me, and Leanna. There's a strange appeal to using the Nikkor 17-55/2.8 AF-S DX G lens wide open at 17mm w/ an S2 Pro at ISO 1600 in an attempt to take a group photo including yourself:

My face has never looked so wide. =P

Check out what just arrived in my inbox:

In a way I'm kind of excited . . . but scared at the same time.

Making this entry was almost as interesting as getting the e-mail: