Klyment.com - Journal

End of last week, Anthony, owner of Baker Optical (new site to be done by Jonathan soon, hopefully) informed me that the replacement lenses for my sunglasses had arrived. End of last week, Sumant, owner of Campus Eye Center informed me that a new supply of Day and Night contact lenses in my prescription had arrived. Monday I decided to take a walking trip to visit these two clients. Here are some photos of the trip.

I typically avoid posting photos of private functions but I feel that the past weekend's wedding shoot with Dong was far from typical. I witnessed the marriage of a young hispanic couple and the associated festivities and throughout the course of the day I felt like I had been adopted into a culture I probably should have been born into. I was overwhelmed with the openess and love that I felt with all of the participants in this event. Everyone was so relaxed leaving no trace of doubt or anxiety. I tried to sense for any hints of self-conciousness and found none and its absence allowed me to lose my own within a few minutes. I have gathered a few photos from the shoot that aren't necessarily representative of what happened but help to convey the openness, comfort level, and joy that I was privileged to share with these humble yet noble people.

Maybe Dong has the right idea when he said that from now on he'd reject wedding coverage requests from white people.

Dong and I are covering a wedding Saturday, November 26th. November 26th? High's +2degrees C or something like that. Scary thought. Anyway, here are some photos of the ceremony venue from today's rehearsal. All photos shot at ISO 1600 hand held with the Fuji F10.

Two days ago Bill Rancic, first winner of NBC's The Apprentice, Patrick LaForge, president and CEO of the Edmonton Oilers hockey club, Jim Dinning, past minister of Education and Provincial Treasurer of Alberta, LuAn Mitchell-Halter, Chatelaine and Profit Magazines Canada's Number One Female Entrepreneur three years in a row and chairperson of Mitchell's Gourmet Foods, and Kelly Hrudey, full-time analyst on CBC's Hockey Night in Canada and former NHL player with the New York Islanders, LA Kings, and San Jose Sharks, spoke at the Alberta Professionals & Entrepreneurs Conference. I've included some photos and a short video clip. Photos are a bit bigger than normal at 250px tall. They'll be back to normal once the excitement of shooting with a P&S camera that can produce dSLR-like photos wears off a bit.

Right click and save a short clip of Bill Rancic's account of his life as an entrepreneur during post-secondary school and beyond. Going into the conference, I wasn't sure what to expect. In fact, I'm not a big fan of Donald Trump and wasn't interested enough in the series description to ever watch an episode of The Apprentice. But now I'll be looking for the show.

I answered phone calls and configured a new convertible tablet PC for Leanna's middle sister, Jessica, for most of the morning and then had an engagement shoot in the afternoon. In the evening I attended a conference keynoted by Bill Rancic, the winner of the first installment of Donald Trump's TV series The Apprentice. More about that and some fun photos to follow. Anyway, knowing what I had to do today, I knew that I wasn't going to be at the studio for most of the day and left a note with the Xerox service call centre to have the tech try my cell phone if they couldn't reach me at the studio. See part 1. Well, he didn't call my cell and called only the studio line. He left a message:

Xerox_tech_answering_machine_message.wav

Ugh . . . thanks Jeff from Xerox Service for calling and letting me know that you were going to call again after lunch . . . and then not call after lunch and not bother leaving a phone number to call you back. Maybe it's my answering machine outgoing message's fault for not explicitly asking Jeff from Xerox Service to leave a phone number along with your name and a message. Even when I was in grade two my dad would have kicked my ass if I failed to take a phone message.

The replacement toner arrived yesterday, shipped to the wrong address, attention to my name (spelled correctly) with the company name "Klimate.com Inv." The only way that I found the shipment was to call back to Xerox with a request ID to look up the tracking number for the package. Anyway, replacement toner went in. Looks like it's something else because now when I print blank pages I get black smears everywhere. Xerox thinks it's the fuser now and they are supposed to get a tech in here to service this thing. Hahah . . . this printer has about 100 pages on it. The Xerox tech support person that I spoke to insisted that I check how much life was left on the fuser to ensure that it was under warranty. 100% life left and 100,000 estimated pages remaining. She figures it's still under warranty so no charge for service this time. I love you guys, you're so generous! I guess that is to be expected after you pay about $4000 for a printer and it can't print a page of regular black text. Anyway, back goes the original, probably perfectly fine toner cartridge. The photo to the left is of the box that the replacement toner came in. It's about the same height as the little box that the toner is immediately packaged within but about four times the width of the box. I'm guessing that they only make one box and it's usually used to ship all four toner cartridges.

Anyway . . . I'm just having some fun with the Fuji F10 while waiting for some prints to come out of the Epson 9600. Ian Sheh put in his second order for prints with me on Breathing Color Sterling 300 which is an archival alpha-cellulose-based fine art paper. Check out his website. He's a shooter too and I believe that he shoots mostly weddings. Nikon D70 user with some pro glass and some Speedotron Brownline studio lighting (ewww). His blog isn't very well developed yet but he does have a pretty cool design portfolio though he could probably use some colour management and colour workflow guidance. Everyone to whom I have shown prints made on Sterling 300 have been very pleased and I am slowly converting people to a matte surface way of thinking. I'm currently printing it at just $6/square foot. Check out the rest of the paper selection and services at this makeshift site.

The Xerox Phaser 7400 arrived about a week ago but it has yet to do a full production run. Apparently the printer shipped with a defective fuser assembly which caused it to streak stuff across pages, especially thicker sheets. This problem was first misdiagnosed as a toner/imager problem when it only appeared in the black channel. Even after Xerox sent me a new toner cartridge at their expense, the problem persisted and subsequently worsened. Now black smearing happens in all four channels so there's a tech coming [hopefully] today but most likely tomorrow.

This printer is spec'ed to do up to 36pages per minute in full colour. It can handle 12 x 18" (and slightly larger) cut sheets of paper and banner lengths up to something like 40". Through the multipurpose tray, this printer is also designed to handle paper weights up to 100lbs or 270gsm and I have seen reports of people using 330gsm, 14pt card stock in this printer with no problems but I'm not going to try it.

After destroying countless F10's with drool I now have one of my own. I got one price matched at McBain Camera and I picked up a 1gig xD card with it . . . good for close to four hundred full resolution, low compression JPEGs. The camera produces cleaner ISO 1600 shots than my D2X and most dSLRs that I've seen. And it's a point and shoot that doesn't even have aperture priority or full manual mode. You could read most stuff about this camera on other sites. I suggest looking at FujiFilm Canada's F10 mini site (visit main website or scale down your window since clicking on the previous link stretches everything), DP review's review of the camera (it only got a "recommended" and not a "highly recommended", something that I don't agree with but it's not my review), and PBase's camera-filtered photo database.

1. Calumet's Demo Clearance Sale official site. I also have a copy of the product list in which I highlighted interesting stuff. Some great deals on PocketWizard standard kits ($199US instead of $300+ US and includes one receiver and one transmitter. Vistek's price for a Plus receiver and transmitter is over $500CDN.), colour management tools, a Fuji GA645Zi (point and shoot medium format "compact" camera with zoom lens), and some great deals on some other medium format gear and some Bowens lighting.
2. FujiFilm Finepix F10. Edmonton local shoppers can get McBain Camera to price match this price. Saves a couple bucks. The price-matched price ends up being about ten dollars more than what the F10 costs through niche market distributor Synnex/EMJ and you don't pay shipping and get in-store warranty. It's quite possibly the best point and shoot digital camera available to the North American market. Japanese shooters are getting the F11 which adds a few of the features that would have made the F10 kill anything within a 50% price radius of the camera. Stuff like aperture and shutter priority shooting modes and I think a fully manual exposure mode. Then again, it's a point and shoot . . . those of you that know how to use those other modes probably have an SLR or professional range finder anyway.
3. Lexjet's clearance sale on lots of signage materials. Discounts average 50% off. I just ordered more water resistant satin cloth, Flagtex, water resistant matte, photographic polypropylene, and a clear polyester which I have no idea what it does but people have apparently used them to create negatives for offset printing plates. The Flagtex wasn't on sale, though but I needed it anyway. If you're in Canada be aware that their default shipping method is UPS. Instruct them to use FedEx Ground or any method other than UPS and also inform them that you'll reject any international package shipped UPS and will reverse credit card charges if they won't refund you. UPS charges exorbitant brokerage fees . . . if you ship via UPS economy, once brokerage has been accounted for you could have shipped via FedEx 2nd day international express for less since Express includes brokerage in the shipping price.

Another Leanna and Klyment shopping entry. Leanna was waiting for some weird lab procedure to finish in the medical sciences building on the University campus and she joined me in searching for some discs. This trip was prompted by several complaints and somewhat negative responses to music I had available in my studio. Everything from Jonathan's burning a music CD on his PowerBook and popping it into my machine without asking and then offering to be my studio DJ any day to Huy's blatant complaint of having his energy completely drawn out by the repetitive drone pumped out by WinAmp to Meags not even venturing to complain about the abysmal lyrics of some song that was in my playlist (I swear it's not all mine). Anyway, we visited Blackbyrd Myoozik, Megatunes, and Southside Sound all on Whyte Avenue. From Blackbyrd I picked up a two disc Jesse Cook collection and a disc by Grandaddy which was definitely NOT what I thought it was. Nasty. The music on the Jesse Cook collection was awesome and it even came with a couple interesting features . . .

Leanna and I were supposed to be baking cookies and banana bread today but scheduling got all screwed up. She recently received one of those mystery savings cards in the mail and we decided to take a trip out to Chapters. Savings range from $5 to $1000 but the clerk jinxed the card by saying that everyone gets the $5 discount and he got a $100 discount. Bastard. On the way, we noticed that Athabasca Books at 105 St. and 82 Ave. was doing their final clearance so we popped in for a look. Everything was 60% off and even the book shelves were for sale. The heartless business person in me scoffed at the closure and screamed "it's about time!" But I could hear the soft sobbing of another voice within me that sympathized with the independent book store owner. It felt her pain. But that didn't stop me from enjoying some nice discounts on some books. I just started reading the pictured book. It's subtitled "The Personal Price of a Political Life" and though I've barely cracked the cover I can already tell that it's going to be an interesting read. It's littered with witty, pessimistic quotes that would make Dr. E. L. Kersten proud. I've gotten through the preface and I'm going to stop here until later considering that I just got to enjoy the sunrise at the END of my day through my studio windows.

Other books included a traditionally-bound copy of Emily Bronte's classic work Wuthering Heights in a matching bone board case, an early edition collection of Alexander Pope's minor poems, and Thomas Hobbes' most famous work, Leviathan. Total bill was about $36 or about as much as what Leanna paid for Jack Welch's book Winning. Leanna got this book for me and I am very happy. Thanks Leanna for driving me out and reuniting me with some fun reading. I'm dedicating the new "Reading" category of my blog to you. During my four year degree program I read no more than 200 pages from the 10,000 or so required pages of text for my classes. So at this same rate, November 19th's purchases should keep me occupied until my 40th birthday. Then again, these books should be far more interesting those those books about supply chain management, performance and quality measurement, and that book that we had to read for that class that was filled with kids waiting for their parents to  die so that they could inherit their parents' companies . . . I mean ORG A 488: Managing Family Enterprise. Anyway, there's no measure for the value of a good literary work but the business voice inside of me says it's a good deal. Athabasca Books will be opened until November 26th and at the end of that day it will close its doors forever. Don't miss the sale. The store is at 105th street and 82 Ave. A short walk from the high school that Leanna and I attended that will remain unnamed.

While there we saw Justin, Jonathan's friend. I didn't recognize at first because he was wearing sunglasses . . . and it was really dark outside. Yeah, man, Leanna says you're hot. Or something.

Dong forwarded these photos to me just over a month ago so I suppose there's nothing new about this news. But that makes four consecutive entries starting with "new". Here's the story as quoted from my request to Dong for commentary:

"Well, it was the middle vehicle that started to smoke up just as the family pulled up and parked their van.  Apparently the smoke came from the undercarriage . . . The vehicle to the left of it was a dark green Honda Odessey, one of our doc’s car and the other one was a pathfinder, one of our senior therpist’s car.  The whole thing was whack!"

Dong also adds that "[t]he photos were taken with a piece of shit 2.0 MP HP camera.  Piece of shit is an understatement."

But of course being lazy and posting random links is just too easy. Those who like my ideas for new studio furniture may also like this site:

http://www.planetdan.net/pics/babies/index.htm

Enjoy.

Okay people, read this text before looking further so you don't get the wrong idea from the title. I discovered something that I really enjoyed doing when working with a young actress and visual arts student this past weekend. We were going to do something a bit different in addition to working on her headshots but in usual Klyment-style what could have taken a few minutes ended up taking several hours. The relaxed, thoughtful pace of the headshot session appealled to me and I think that it would make me happy if I did more headshots. In a way, fashion, glamour, editorial, and headshots are all very related . . . but I feel that working on a headshot with someone gives the photographer a brief glimpse into the soul of whom he or she is photographing. Often I see photos of people who I know in real life and normally find very attractive. However, I have difficulty transferring this attraction to the photograph. Something is usually missing. It's like the person in the photograph isn't speaking to me but is drifting in some distant bubble, filed away in a display case, untouchable. I see this in a lot of my own photos. I don't have a formal portfolio right now but the few traces of a portfolio that I do have right now will hopefully soon be replaced by photos that tell a viewer who these people are . . . and perhaps a little about myself as well.

Breaking from the usual routine of laziness and half-assed attempts at making witty commentaries to some other sites, I have included a few photos from Meags' shoot. She is one of Rapid Fire Theatre's improvisors. All photos from the shoot were taken with with the Nikon D2X at ISO 100, 1/250s, and either the Micro-Nikkor 60mm F/2.8 AF-D (not latest generation) or the Carl Zeiss/Hasselblad 80mm F/2.8 Planar C T* with an adapter for F-mount. I suppose I have also discovered new love in the 60mm. I was prepared to sell it to Dong (get your frickin' content to Jonathan so he can finish your site already) because shooting with it only reminded me of the beauty that I lost when I left the Contax/Yashica mount and the Carl Zeiss 60mm F/2.8 Makro Planar and defected to the F-mount camp. All lighting was performed with a single Balcar Power Z head connected to a Balcar Nexus A3200. Light was modified with a Plume 40 x 53" Wafer. Light reflected with a 45" white reflector to the bottom left of the composure.