Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

Not much update in last few days, but anyway I was scanning a lot and will have new photographs soon. It was quite busy time home last few days and I enjoy beautiful weather we have here.
I was thinking to put bigger images on web. I am scanning with 900px maximal dimension and for web I always downsized to 600px. Is there any reason I shouldn't put 900px on web. Well it doesn't fit on 1024x768 when in portrait orientation.

This was one of the few moments when I felt I need to ask permssion to take a picture, just not to be root. I did ask

In a lunch break I often walk around company and to the Amphitheatre which is behind it.

In a lunch break I often walk around company and to the Amphitheatre which is behind it.

I realy liked those snow covered benches.

We were returning to the Gamla Stan, people in groups talking, kissing and watching helicopter staying on one place for ages

View from boat to the Gamla Stan

I was watching it for long time, about ten shots.

I have add about 30 new pictures and one new gallery (Holiday in Slovakia). This gallery is only temporary. The most pictures are added into Stockholm gallery.
I also changed web interface for browsing pictures and small improvement in title of each page. Hope you like it now better.

I am going to move few pictures from "Holiday in Slovakia" gallery to "Slovakia" gallery and remove it. It was mainly because to share those pictures with my friends with who I was on that holiday.
Result of experiment with bigger size is that I will keep 600px or maybe little bigger 700 or so. 900px is too much as indicated.

I removed gallery "Holiday in Slovakia" and move few pictures from it to gallery "Slovakia".
I am looking into use of nice software called IMatch for managing my photos. It looks promissing. Originally I was thinking to make one myself, but it would be reinventing of weel I guess.

I am playing with my Epson 890 and printing quad tones black and white photos. I am getting fairly good results considering, that I still use normal Epson inks and not MIS VM. All prints are done at Epson Archival Matt paper. I would like to do some prints for my friends and will try some Epson glossy paper as well. I see this as a test drive to get some practice and knowledge.

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Also handling IMatch is going quite well, it has a 30 day tryout period so I am trying to do max in those days. And well I have feel I need to little upgrade my system. I have 40GB HD to install and need to buy some more memory.

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last roll page is empty now. I soon will scan new roll and new pictures will be there. This time I like to try new way of scanning and extracting only green channel from full RGB 48bit scan. I hope this way I can get sharper and richer scans.

I did scan two new rolls, but there is nothing which looks good to me.
Currently also doing a lot of changes on my computer. Trying to clean things up with reinstalling everything. I like to have clean environment. I have got new room so now I like to make that order also in computer so it can work reliably and do what I like it to do. I should soon receive new memmory which should speed up performance, well 1.2GB of RAM should be enough, shoudn't?

Computer still not in fully the shape I would like to have. As I am getting older I really starting to hate these things, why they can not work right and reliable for the first time! You always have to do some extra and spent time you love to use for something totally different.
I hope when this is over I will be able to work finaly on new photos, I have so many plans. Just take a look:

• put everything under IMatch
• do scans and prints for Bart
• finaly do some prints with MIS VM inks on epson 890
• scan and edit few best pictures and print them
• profile Fuji FDI machine in lab
• try out hc-100 and ilfotec DD-X with film test
• prepare portfolio of best ten or so prints
• try to print some in classical darkroom
• ... and much more :-(

You are not going to believe this, but my computer has died. I can not believe it either. First my new 40GB HD went off and because I had swap there, and it was on different controller than by boot disk, or maybe because something elese, my win2000 just do not boot anymore. I am getting screen saying "no swap file going to allocate temporary one 20MB" and than computer is frozen. :-( !!!!!