Klyment.com - Journal

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You can search the string "Rapid Fire Theatre" or "Improvaganza" in the search box in the bar on the right. Users using lower resolution screens may have to open my blog in a new window if linked from another part of my site since I have scrollbars disabled in my master layout. I'll soon become unlazy enough to think of an aesthetically pleasing solution to this problem.

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Oct2005/20051012_3025.html

I can see the university spinoff company's tagline now . . . Less human, more bomb!

The long-awaited reshoot of the people behind C.D.E. Records happened Saturday. All photos were shot in RAW with the D2X at ISO 100 and processed with Phase One Capture One Pro 3.7.1. Here is a sampling of what we produced:

From now on, all RAW files will be processed in Capture One Pro unless I find something better. The quality of the conversion is beyond anything I've ever seen before, even from my previous encounter with Capture One and a Phase One P25 22MP back mounted on a Contax 645. D2X images are pretty clean right up to ISO 800. ISO 1600 looks just a bit noisier than ISO 400 when the same images are converted using RawShooter Essentials and ISO 3200 looks a bit rougher than ISO 800 processed in RSE. As Joe Zasada put it, RSE's not bad for a freebie. However, there is better stuff out there. Capture One not only processes with significantly wider exposure latitude and lower noise but it gives the most control over white balance and colour right out of the RAW conversion without having to bring the image into Photoshop for further processing. With the Pro variant you can also crop and straighten/rotate QUICKLY (modifier missing from description of Adobe Camera RAW which also does this). The system is very well integrated and it also has the fastest interface of any RAW converter that I have ever used. However, the actual conversion process takes a bit longer than RSE though it's still faster than ACR or Nikon Capture but since it's sitting in the batch queue anyway while you continue to work it's not a huge deal. Average physical memory foot print when working with D2X files with a queue full of files is about 200megs. If you haven't tried it already, download the 30day free trial and see if it's worth the 500Euros. I'll be shelling out for it once my trial is over. It gives me the dynamic range and colour out of a D2X file that I was getting out of the S3 Pro with the Fuji Hyper Utility software while giving me the a similar workflow involvement as working with S3 Pro JPEGs. C1 lets you output up to three files from the same instance of the RAW file . . . so one giant lossless file in 16bit TIFF and ProPhoto RGB colour space if desired (I usually reserve this for when I want to print to save space), one for web-sized medium quality JPEG which, to this moment, I have yet to see any artifacting, and, of course, one tiny file for the blog. Obviously I could make blog-sized photos whenever I wanted to from the full-sized file but since it doesn't take much longer to make the third file and each file is around 20KB it has now become part of the workflow. With a JPEG, you'd still have to do scaling and possibly some colour adjustments and the adjustment palettes are no where near as accessible in Photoshop as they are in C1 or RSE. 

The Fuji S3 Pro seemed to have taken a price hit in Canada last week. About two weeks ago I returned a Fuji S3 Pro to a local camera store at $2650 plus GST. Today I checked and Camera Canada and found the camera available for just $2351.60 plus GST including the Hyper Utility software. One could go to McBain Camera and get it price matched at below McBain's cost. Don't worry . . . they'll have to clear it out sometime. Beware - the reason why I returned the camera was because I wished to use it as a JPEG camera. However, with the original firmware, the camera has really awful auto white balance and if you wish to derive any benefit from the new secondary sensor set for increased dynamic range, the buffer depth drops to three shots in RAW and since the camera doesn't compress the RAW files, even a 45x memory card takes about ten two twelve seconds to write. The camera also seems to have focusing problems. The new firmware requires an optional $80 adapter to flash. This adapter, or any Fuji variants of this adapter, are unavailable anywhere in stock locally and would have to be special ordered. Without the adapter and firmware upgrade, anyone who needs to shoot more than about 10FPM (that's frames per *MINUTE*) hopefully brings a grey card with them and white balance every shot. Better to bring a light meter as well as metering on the S3 Pro can be a bit wonky at times with the original firmware.

I grabbed a couple of Kingston 2GB Elite Pro compact flash cards for about $145 each plus about $5 of shipping the other day. They are 50x cards and perform a tad bit faster than the Transcend 45x cards that I was running with earlier with the D2X. I haven't performed extensive tests on it with any other digital camera. These cards feature a lifetime warranty whereas the $210 Transcend cards don't. Furthermore, locally, even the cheapest 2gig compact flash cards are selling for over $200 and they are 4x cards by Sandisk (blue and red label). If you need these cards and don't know where to find them in Canada for a decent price feel free to e-mail me as my supplier can drop ship anywhere in Canada for about $5 for this card.

After upgrading Serendipity, I remembered that the Serendipity developer that helped me out had an Amazon.de wishlist which I had tried to get him something from. The challenge is documented in German in an entry in Garvin Hicking's blog. In fact, it is also documented in this blog in another entry. Anyhow, I retried the process and I think that I may have just completed an Amazon.de wishlist transaction in German. I hope that it works.

As some of you are aware, I used a beta version of an online, database-driven gallery framework named Gallery for my newest online gallery. The upgrade from my beta version of Gallery 2 to full Gallery 2 was less than seamless . . . however, this was to be expected. The installation documentation for my earlier version of Gallery 2 warned that the database schema from the beta version of Gallery 2 that I was installing then was likely to evolve into something very different even at later stages of beta. I may consider restoring Gallery 2 from a backup file later but I'll likely black hole it and officially blackhole the Yappa Next Generation gallery system as well and start fresh since Gallery 2 has now been fully released as version 2.0.