Forgotten Fleet

I was sliding through The Awesomer today and saw a link to Scott Haefner’s site. Under the cover of darkness, Scott and two friends rafted out to the Ghost Fleet at Suisun Bay on numerous occasions and stayed multiple days at a time. This work shows some serious dedication and risk taking on their part and I think  it really payed off.

Check it out here!

MiJ Fender Stratocaster HRR

I bought this guitar not knowing much about it other than the price looked good, it had a nice tone and held tune well. When it comes right down to it, as far as I am concerned that is really all that matters. I looked up the SN with my phone right in the store and knew it was a “Fuji-gen Plant (for Fender Japan), Japan in the Year(s): 1990 – 1991″ but as for exact specs, I thought it might be an altered HM. I went home and did some research but without it being right in front of me, it was still a mystery. When I went back the next day to buy it, every guy in the store had something to say about how odd it was: “It has an american body”,”no way it came with that bridge” and “it never would have come with that pickup”. From what I have seen on the web, the guitar is completely stock except for an aluminum brace under the bridge, probably placed there to repair a crack in the bridge post hole. After doing some research I discovered this is actually a MiJ Fender Stratocaster 60s HRR  (60s Hot Rod Reissue). You can see the 50s version and more info on this thread here (notice how every body has an opinion about its correctness over there too) and for more information go here and here. In this thread here, axeman417 has a nice write up concerning value and quality of these guitars.

Some of the features of this guitar are:

Made In Japan K018xxx serial number on the neck right above the comfort radius neck plate that says Fender USA.
Original Floyd Rose bridge and locking nut.
DiMarzio humbucker pickup with coil split on the middle tone knob.
500k volume and 500k center tone and 250k TBX with a detent on the outside knob.
Headstock says Fender Stratocaster with synchronized tremolo and Original Custom Body.
Flush tremolo spring cover.

A Nice Article on Lens Testing

I follow a blog called Canon Rumors and this week they posted an article from Roger Cicala over at LensRentals.com about lens testing for people who take pictures called How To Test a Lens.

Roger brings an interesting perspective to this conversation because LensRentals.com have so many lenses and test them so frequently. Something most of us don’t have the luxury to do.

Another great article from Roger is This Lens is Soft that delves in tolerances of camera and lens manufacturing and how one lens might be soft on one camera and not on another.

Monitor Calibration and Print Profile Troubleshooting

Everybody says calibrate your monitor and use print profiles and everything will turn out great.

What happens if you are calibrating and profiling, following great workflow using good paper blah blah blah and things still don’t seem right. For me I knew something was wrong because my video looked over saturated and my prints dull.

After searching the web and coming up with nothing useful, I started digging around and found that my Nividia drivers have their own color control (other video makers may as well). Under Nvidia Control Panel, Display, Adjust desktop color settings there are Gamma, Hue, Vibrance and even a Color channel mixer.

For 2. Choose how color is set pick Other applications control color settings

For 3.  Apply the following enhancements

Vibrance = 50%

Hue = 0

Mine was set to a Vibrance of 58% and it was enough to cause no end of headaches. How it got this way I may never know, that was the first time I had seen that dialog box.

X-rite ColorChecker Passport with Lightroom and Camera Raw

I heard about the X-rite ColorChecker Passport on Michael Frye’s website. If you are calibrating your monitor, this is a great way to calibrate your camera. Ok, technically you are not calibrating your camera, you are calibrating your RAW images. If you are not calibrating your monitor, nothing else you do with color calibration will matter, you should stop reading this and google monitor calibration. Michael does a good job explaining the ColorChecker but I found X-rite has an excellent webinar video tutorial for using the ColorChecker Passport with Lightroom and Camera Raw to get the most accurate color from your camera. The video goes over how to use the Passport to get the right white balance in portraits and landscapes. It also shows how to make camera profiles in Lightroom without doing DNG conversions first.