Calibrate Monitor, check!

As I get closer to having an Honest-To-God gallery-style show of my scuba photographs, I have compiled a basic checklist of the Things That I Need To Get Done. Paramount of these was to calibrate my monitor, before I actually got the prints made.

I've been doing 8.5"x11" prints on my Epson R800 printer for over a year now, with excellent results, however I would run into situations where the colours were just a little bit off, and when it's magenta instead of royal blue... well, the effect would be just a little startling. So, I finally bit the bullet and went out to purchase the Spyder 2, from Colorvision. Probably about the cheapest calibration tool out there, it was easy to install, setup and work through the wizard... finally I can say that I have the ability to produce prints that are exactly as I see 'em on the screen. Mwah ha ha.

The next step is to finish off Photoshopping about 30 prints, which I should have done before the end of next week. At that point, I'm going to do a test run with an interent based printing service as well as a local bricks-and-mortar printer to see who will give me the best bang for the buck. The real cost in this entire endeavour will be the framing, I suspect. :-\ I'm still debating on the print size that I'm going to go with, but I'm leaning towards 16x20".

Regards,

Imp;)

The Flu...

Sucks.

/me crawls back into bed.

Shooting Pretty Girls...

... and other fun things to do on a Sunday Afternoon. :-)

Over the past few weeks I've being paying more attention to shooting more than just the usual scuba diving photos. A good friend in Toronto has been shooting her friends for some time, and invited me along. It was only fair I suspect, since she wanted to use most of my lighting gear and even a lens or two.

The model was a girl named Andrea, and though she's not doing any modelling nowadays, she used to. Now she's a stay at home mum and does the odd Makeup Artist gig. It was a good afternoon, but it's very aparent that with two photographers, we needed one more model at least... maybe even two more, so they could take breaks. Still and all, I'm starting to get some decent results. I would like to figure out how to make some of the space in my house more ammenable to shooting, but unfortunately it's one of those houses that are very narrow and very long. :-
Ah well, guess I'll have to go rent a studio in January. :-D

Ciao,

Mark :)  

Short Vacations & Other Blasphemies

Sharky,
originally uploaded by The Imp;-).

I was on a boat, in the Bahamas from November 26th through December 3rd… and while scuba diving is definitely one of my favourite things in the world to be doing (right after sex and before shooting {firearms, you perverts!}), ;-) I think that maybe doing 5 dives a day may be a trifle excessive. By the end of the trip you are somewhat exhausted. The daily schedule is something like this:

7:00 - wake up. Morning ablutions, and prepare dSLR camera for first dive (housing, o-rings, CF card, strobe charge, etc.).
8:00 - breakfast! Mmmmm… fooooooood.
9:00 - Dive! Dive! Dive!
9:45 ish - snack, prepare camera for second dive (change out CF card, download to portable hard drive, etc.).
10:30 ish - Dive! Dive! Dive!
11:45 ish - shower, change into dry clothes, prepare camera for third dive (change out CF card, download to portable hard drive, etc.).
12:00 ish - Lunch! :-D Mmmmmmmm… food.
2:00 ish - Dive! Dive! Dive!
3:30 ish - snack, prepare camera for fourth dive (change out CF card, download to portable hard drive, etc.).
4:00 ish - Dive! Dive! Dive!
5:00 ish - shower, change into dry clothes, prepare camera for fifth dive (change out CF card, download to portable hard drive, etc.).
6:00 ish - Dinner! Mmmmmm…. Food.
7:00 ish - Night Dive! Night Dive! Night Dive!
8:00 ish - shower, change into dry clothes, change out camera CF card, download to portable hard drive, etc.
8:30-11:00 ish - Drink rum.
11:00 ish - 7:00 sleep. Mmmmm….. Sleep.

So, after 5.5 days of diving, you've done some 27 dives and are more than ready to come home. The plus side is that your liver needs the rest that going back to work will bring. :-) Even better, you've lost 5 lbs from all the friggen finning you've done over the week. :-)

Weather was nice… 27-30 Celsius all week. :-) Weather back home is… -7. Grrrr...

Getting back to work is never fun though, especially when there has been a re-org in your absence. The job is still there, but I'm part of a team now… oye vey, didn't anyone write down in my file, "Does not play well with others!"? I'm pretty sure that we addressed this as far back as Kindergarten. ;-)

I have to move from my alpha-cube/real-estate to some yet-to-be-determined cubicle-from-hell, in order to be close to my new team. *shudder* I'll give it a go… not exactly like I was given a choice, but I always find it somewhat disconcerting that management needs to keep trying to fix that which isn't broken; that is what has slowly happened to the group I worked with over the past 5 years. I should write a book on it… "When M&A's Become Your Doom" … oh hell, I'm sure Scott Adams (Dilbert) has already take care of that for me. :-
Anyways… happy holidays and all that good stuff.

Regards,

Imp;)