Klyment.com - Journal

Ethan posted this in a forum considered by many of its users as one of the few places on the internet where you can get honest feedback to photographic work. He posted the link with the ironic text "[o]h man, this app is going to streamline my life." flojuggler is a website that allows you to track the menstrual cycles of up to ten women at time of posting. The creator has an FAQ with some creative applications for this website. Anyhow, why Ethan's comment is ironic is because other than his mom, I doubt there are other women in his life to track.

On second thought, Ethan probably shouldn't be tracking his mom's menstrual cycles anyway but thanks for the link!

I was looking for a unique land line phone with sharper lines like those in my HTC Touch Diamond GSM and came across Binatone's iDECT X5 phone. I ordered the phone through a UK seller on eBay because I was unable to find a North American seller and because all of the European sellers wanted £40-70 ($60-$100) or about 50% more than the eBay seller and wouldn't ship out of Europe. Overall, the phone is beautifully designed with thoughtfully laid out keypadand call quality is excellent. Fit and finish is good though the AAA NiMH batteries (included) rattled inside the battery chamber a bit due to poor fitting band because they were stacked linearly and not in parallel. Fixing the rattle was easy; I wrapped a bit of tape around each battery and reinstalled them. The body of both the handset and the stand are made of plastic but the finish is no uglier than that of the blasphemously-painted top plate of the silver $9000 Leica M9 digital rangefinder cameras. But maybe some people prefer the damage-prone plastic-y painted finish over the chrome or black chrome finishes of the current pre-M9 Leicas considering Leica now offers to paint instead of chrome your M7 or MP for an extra $100.

Box shot. Yes, it's beat up but hey, I work with what I get. Plus it's probably the only box shot for this phone on the Internet at time of writing. The graphic design on the exterior of the box is attractive and the printing quality is satisfactory.

The phone in front of the base, adapter, and a plug adapter that I picked up from Black's for the system. I checked London Drugs for a plug adapter and they didn't have a physical plug adapter but had a universal adapter with interchangeable tips that would completely replace the packaged adapter for $15. A sales rep suggested that I check out The Source and 220 (I think it's spelled like that) at West Edmonton Mall. The Source had physical plug adapters but they wanted $15 just for those. Zellers didn't have universal adapters or plug adapters and suggested that I check out London Drugs or the Source. As I was about to exit Kingsway Garden Mall I decided I'd stop into Black's and check. They had a well-built plug adapter for $9. I'm guessing that Princess Auto would have them cheaper and had I been more patient, I could have asked my parents to bring me an adapter from home because they have lots of that sort of stuff.

Phone on its base. The base has a recorded message counter. My criticism of the base is that it may be a little too minimalistic in that there is no large "guide" to help a user who attempts to sloppily replace the phone to quickly get it back into place. It also lacks the audio and visual feedback of plugging in/charging that my Netgear SPH-200 Skype/Standard Dual Phone offers. Still, these are minor complaints.

Well . . . sort of. This frame has been on my list of 4x5's to rescan once I got the drum scanner up and running. We shot this almost a year ago when we were scouting that abandoned house site north of Bon Accord.

If I recall correctly, this film was Ilford HP5+ shot at stock speed and processed in Kodak HC-110 Dilution B. The fixer had been exhausted or had otherwise gone bad and my usual policy to peek into the tank after the first two minutes of fixing probably killed the film. I closed up the tank and remixed a batch of fresh fixer but the damage had already been done. Still, kind of a neat look for the frame. Photo shot with the Sinar X and Schneider Symmar-S 210mm F/5.6. Colours deliberately retained and levels adjusted so that the maximum amount of tonal information would be retained which doesn't always mean the scan will be neutral or linear.

At left is the negative from which I made the previous scan and to the right is a properly exposed and developed frame shot on the same film for comparison.

Google Chrome has been colour space aware since version 3 (I think) but a recent search for "Google Chrome colour management" on Google, ironically, did not yield instructions for how to activate it. For this reason, and for personal reference, I am posting the instructions here. I have only tested this functionality in Windows Vista but I am guessing that Windows XP w/ Windows Color Control Panel installed and Vista and beyond plus Mac OS should work similarly. 

In your shortcut to launch Google Chrome you'll need to add this switch after whatever you find in the "Target" box in the shortcut's properties:

--enable-monitor-profile

So it should look something like:

Now just make sure that you use the shortcut and not some other way to launch Chrome and you should be set. Hopefully Google will integrate colour management settings into a control panel similarly to how it is handled in Firefox. 

My Panasonic DMC-GH1 Micro Four Thirds camera with the standard 14-140mm kit lens and the 20mm F/1.7 that's normally packaged with the Panasonic GF1, Rode NTG-2 microphone and shock mount arrived the morning of the day I was to shoot the Art Gallery of Alberta's Art on the Block silent auction fund raising event. It is the first Art on the Block event held by the gallery since it has been reopened as the Art Gallery of Alberta and, fittingly, it was the first time that I was to shoot any event with a camera with a smaller capture area than that of the APS-C sized dSLR sensor as the primary camera. While I packed the Leica M7 and the 35mm F/2 Zeiss Biogon I only shot a half roll of Ilford Delta 400 at ISO 800 and I have yet to process the film. The digital files have already been delivered to the AGA. I don't normally blog about event photos but I feel that being comfortable shooting this event with, effectively, an interchangeable-lens high end point and shoot digital camera, as the official photographer says something about the viability of using such a system for serious photographic work. I have already joked to Dong Kim, Ethan Oblak, Corey Thompson, Justin Poulsen, Craig Hobbs, and Leanna about quitting shooting with Nikon dSLRs for small format work and while I don't really intend on selling off my Nikon gear, I don't see a need to pack it for event work anymore. For the foreseeable future, I intend to shoot events with just the GH1 and the Leica M7 and their complement of lenses.

All photographs shot with the Panasonic 20mm F/1.7 and processed in Adobe Lightroom 2.x. Most of the shots were made at least three quarters of a stop underexposed . . . sometimes deliberately and sometimes accidentally. I had just gotten the camera and had accidentally changed exposure compensation without figuring out how to change it deliberately until later in the night and, at least for this evening, camera had a tendency to underexpose to preserve highlight detail even if the photographer made no exposure compensation offset. Thank you to Adam Neufeldt at McBain Camera for helping me with my purchase.

The main auction and entertainment area.

Mid-action awkward facial expression and body position shooting started pretty early.

This scene is heavily backlit which proves that the camera handles scenes with high contrast acceptably. There were shots in which the sky is blown out but it doesn't blow out in a way that most smaller sensor-equipped cameras typically blow out the sky.

I was worried that the less oblong 4:3 aspect ratio of the camera would impact my hand held compositions but was pleasantly surprised to find that all of the visual elements that I wanted to incorporate into my shots fit naturally. The 4:3 aspect ratio feels more similar to the 4:5 aspect ratio of the Toyo VX125 than it does to the 2:3 aspect ratio of almost all of my other cameras and the Toyo is always shot on a tripod.

The camera lacks an optical viewfinder and typical auto focus points that you would find in a normal SLR with a mirror. Instead, the camera uses contrast-based autofocus off of the image picked up by the sensor like what most point and shoot digital cameras use or like the contrast-based autofocus found in the Nikon D3 and D300 when in tripod live view mode. Except this auto focus is very snappy . . . snappy enough to capture certain people's facial expressions before they recognize me. Autofocus is comparable to that of the D300 in similar situations though I know many would argue that the D300 may still be faster.

The backlit donor wall has been a challenging background to use when tuning for natural skintones even with the Nikon D3 but the GH1 seems to handle the situation satisfactorily. White balance was unaltered from the original capture with only some adjustments made to brightness and contrast.

Using the "automatic everything" autofocus mode was convenient and fun though about 10-20% of the shots could have been focused better. That said, the shots weren't completely out of focus; one would sometimes prefer to have a face facing the camera in focus than the back of a head but the photographer could opt for a more deliberate autofocusing mode.

One of the major complaints of the Four Thirds and Micro Four Thirds format is that the smaller sensors lead to shorter focal lengths being used for the same angle of view as one would achieve with a larger sensor. However, when lens manufacturer's follow through with one of the original design and marketing pushes of offering wider relative aperture lenses, one can easily overcome the increase in comparative depth of field with wider apertures. All of this in a lens that barely protrudes from the camera body more than the grip.

Processing almost 250photos in about an hour after shooting them was pretty easy considering how Lightroom worked with the raw files. It seems that automatic white balance information was fully communicated through to the software and the white balance information gives the photographer a useful start from which to tune. That said, at ISO 1600 and above and under mixed artificial lighting conditions white balancing a Nikon D3 file would yield cleaner tonal transitions and with more pleasing and natural skintones.

This image along with a few of the other images from the set exhibited some interesting blur around faces. I don't know what kind of camera and subject movements could have created the blur around the gentleman's face while keeping the face of the lady in red relatively sharp and in focus in the way we see it here but I don't find it objectionable.

Tracking movement with this camera was similar to tracking movement with a Contax G1 or G2, Zeiss Ikon, or Leica M7. On top of that, one could very quickly achieve focus and continually maintain focus as subject and camera moves unlike the Leica M-mount range finders which would require the photographer to predict distance changes and continue focus adjustment blindly unless one were to compose with subject under the rangefinder patch in the middle of the frame. In the case of the Contax G system, there is no way to focus track without keeping part of the subject under the single auto focus point. Like comparisons to the Nikon D3, these may not seem like relevant comparisons but when choosing a camera for a particular assignment we need to consider what the absolute best tool for the job is and not just what works within a certain budget or which cameras review best by non-photographers running review websites reviewing under hypothetical laboratory conditions.

The 20mm lens rendered subjects in close range attractively and without objectionable distortions that even lenses like the Nikon or Canon 17-55mm F/2.8 lenses typically render when shot in landscape and at under 35mm.

Obviously not shot by me but this photo goes to show how easy it is for someone who has never used this camera before to pick it up make a technically-sound photo. Furthermore, I am far from being model material and I am long overdue for a hair cut but by Klyment-standards this looks pretty good.

Just a quick update since I'm still working through a backlog of scanning. Most of the new scans are still under embargo. Full artist profile associated with this photo to come. I'm still pretty new at the mounting thing but I feel that my colour management experience has made the colour handling part of learning this new technology fairly painless. If anyone needs some drum scanning done in the next month or so I'm willing to do drum scans to 16bit per channel TIFFs at up to 4000DPI for just $20/scan plus $10/mounting and burned onto your choice of DVDs or Blu-ray discs. For 4x5's I can comfortably mount two frames per mounting but  have been having luck with the last two mountings in which I put four sheets of film. For 6x6 I'm guessing I can get six to twelve frames in per mounting.

Christina and Aaron Ignacio-Deines' dining room, as styled by Christina and Aaron Ignacio-Deines. Shot with the Schneider 72mm F/5.6 Super-Angulon XL on the Linhof Technikardan 45s. Filtered with a Lee 80A polyester filter. Kodak Portra 160 VC. F/8. 30s exposure.

Unsharpened 100% crop from the previous image. Scanned at 4000DPI on the Howtek Scanmaster 4500 drum scanner (circa 1994) driven by Aztek's fantastic Digital Photo Lab Professional software. Fluid mounted with Kami fluids and Aztek-packaged optical mylar. Full resolution 16bit per channel/48bit TIFF is almost 2gigs. The "noise" that you see here is film grain, not digital noise.