Ingy's Index

I am staying at the Buwalda house in Whitby and am excited about spending some time with My Sister and Brother in Law in the evenings after the event. Mark is going to pick me up there in the mornings so that will be great and I don’t have to walk all the way to the 401 in the mornings to get picked up by Warren and the crew.

We are experiencing a pretty big snowstorm but I’m taking the GO bus there. I hope someone is home at the house to pick me up from the train station when I get there tonight. I am going to stop off in Toronto on the way to shoot some photos downtown if it’s not too crazy out.

We  had a fun weekend shooting in Blenheim with Alex, Luke, Mark and 2 new guys. My usual job has been to do floor videos lately but since Alex does the sorting so well it is also the first position new folks are trained on so this weekend I shot the Beam photos and video.

We stayed at Luke’s Parent’s house about half an hour to the event and we got spoiled with all kinds of food and treats. I liked having the time driving to the gig past all the windmills majestically and quietly creating clean energy unlike the noisy Oil Rigs we are used to seeing in the area. Funny how they are never complained about!

I have been a fan of Ed Mika’s work for a while now and messed around with cheap EOS-FD adapters for a long time now so I finally had the chance to buy one! I arranged to meet him in Collingwood and we had a nice Sushi lunch while he fine tuned my lens. There was some dust inside from my early experimentation with adjusting the focus field so he continued surgery at his place.

The Adapter is machined to such a very fine tolerance that the lens fits better than any of my other EOS Super-telephotos ever did and he Lubricated the turning mechanism which made that old lens rock solid again and it;s such a pleasure to snap it into vertical  position and back. Way faster than the EOS 300 2.8L.

Well we had a great trip and are enjoying Rennie and Patrick’s hospitality. They have 3 cats and unlimited opportunity for indoor wildlife photography! These cats are so loving and sweet and photogenic too! I am having fun shooting them while everyone sleeps. Funny how cats and I share the same sleeping habits! If I get bored with cats there is a window sill that contains a toad farm and a room full of Rabbits to shoot.

We have reached the QD! Our favourite halfway point stop. The make their own Egg Nog and we buy enough for everyone on our visit plus they have AMAZING hot dogs. I usually grab a Diet Lime Coke to wake me up for the rest of the trip and let Leena Nap for a bit while I pre-browse. We didn’t stay too long this trip because we only have limited tim to see Geraldine who is so busy working during the Holidays.

Nice weather and good traffic conditions! We are enjoying the beginning of Blue Hour and my longing to drive truck always re-awakens when I see tankers in all their glory. When I was a kid I wanted to haul dynamite, fuel or something else dangerous!

We stopped to organize the car a bit better and set up the DeLorme system for my own entertainment. Leena has her trusty GPS already set up. We couldn’t do it in front of the house because of the early morning traffic on my street. It’s nice to be finally on our way!

What to bring? What to bring? I am packing for my road trip to Chicago with Leena. I think my house mates are glad I’m getting out of their hair for a few days too. I guess item number 1 would be my camera, number 2? Probably my passport. I plan on keeping you up to date with photos and clips from my phone camera as Leena and I make the annual road trip past many tantalizing truck stops and department stores! The traditional sad stop is when we go to the empty closed down Elias Tobias Big Boy and reminisce about our little dog who had one of his last walks there.

I spent my day going to Labs since I ran low on ink on the Portable Printer and decided to use the rest for on Location Sales. I assumed it was a straight forward job but today’s digital labs just can’t do decent quality! Not compared to traditional processes or even the AMAZING job the PrintMate Portable printer does. Unfortunately it eats up the ink at an ALARMING rate when printing Black and White. Now with this printer, I need to create white borders because it crops the image somewhat so I redid each photo, planning on taking it to a 1 hour lab. Apparantly it was a waste of time since the labs also crop the hell out of images.

Now battle number one was with my Epson 1400, which started at about 2:00am and by 10:00am I was still trying to get one printhead unclogged. This printer was modified to make beautiful black and white prints with each of the colours switched to a custom set of grey tone ink pigment. It ended with a Warning sign that said:  ”PARTS INSIDE YOUR PRINTER ARE AT THE END OF THEIR LIFE”. If this ever happens to you, go to http://www.epsonreset.com/ and download the software and you are good to go again after it resets the inkpad counter. I need to purchase a cleaning solution and I hope that will work but time restrictions forced me to put the printer aside and find a lab to do the job. Epson just wants you to buy another printer .

Ideally I wanted to find a Lab sort of close to HomeGrown or on the way so I tried Shopper’s Drug Mart. I knew at first glance at the workstation that it was  Fuji Dye Sub printer but I thought I’d give it a try anyway since they are much higher end than my Kodak. I was actually a bit relieved and amused when the Kiosk reported an error. The clerk had to take out the rolls and mess with them and it brought back so many memories of trying to print at events and Hockey Dust messed up the system. Anyway the print came out with a Magenta hue so she suggested I set the printer to Black and White, resulting in the same hue. She actually said it must be my camera, or the files. She tried to give me a photoshop lesson in converting Black and White. What a dip, trying to insult my knowledge of photography. I was OUT OF THERE!

Next? Japan Camera In Jacksonville Mall. Yes a good old fashioned Noritsu Wet-Lab, I convinced them to let me do a test print if I paid for it and 45 minutes later I got the result. A badly cropped muddy greenish image on the worst photo paper I have ever seen!

Off to Black’s next! I waited for the bus and saw some poor dude on a racing bike wipe out when a car cut him off by one of those IDIOT Hamilton driver’s with a cell phone. Suddenly I remembered another crash back in 2003 when I used a lab to get out an image to the wire and it was right in the Mall! I had my passport photo done their a while ago so I knew they were still around.

They had an image limit of 5 prints so I decided on the first five and was careful to tell then not to cut off the graphic. There was some confusion about borders, which I refused since I had included borders in the finished art work that was EXACTLY 4×6. 45 minutes later I had 5 prints with the graphic cut off but they were stunning! I ordered the whole bunch with border’s and an hour later I had 17 beautiful images in my hands. I recommend this lab highly after my adventure today!

Man it felt good to hang the rest of those photos on the wall. I still need to make a sign since no one really knows to look for my show in the stairwell but at least now I can go on my Christmas Holiday knowing it is done and ready for phase 3 when I get back in the new year!