Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

I still have a head full of thought of what I have heart in my portfolio reviews. I have got nice mail from friend, and I am reading a lot around the subjects I like to cover with my photos. It is a interesting journey I started by those 20min talks. I am grateful my reviewers for their opinions and suggestions. They make my problem visible and now I can solve it. It is all up to me now!

For a while I was thinking about making some series from commercial environment. This is photo I took while ago, maybe it is a start of it. Who knows?

Last few days we were very much busy with finishing work in our new bathroom and therefore I didn't have much time to do with photography. I nevertheless was thinking and reading a lot about topic which makes my mind busy from time I had portfolio reviews.

I have also receive my order of PermaJet Alpha and Omega papers. I like to try those new papers, which are not really cheaper than Hahnemuhle, but could gave me better results and also option to print little bit more cooler tone.

Yesterday evening I have watch movie which my friend point out more than year ago. It is Czech movie "Cesta z mesta". After I saw it I can't help myself but I mis these kind of movies. It reminds me Slovak movie I saw long time ago "Zahrada". I like both of these, both gave me feeling of freedom.

You know, sometimes it's not easy. Imagine this, two weeks is your house upside down because rebuilding work. Than when you think is finally over, you start doing some stuff for having nicer place to live. So you busy every afternoon after working hours with drilling and all kinds of work with wood. In the middle of the day you got phone call that your son was injured in school and need to go to doctor. So you run there, luckily it seems to be not that fatal as it looks at first sign. And than you go to play tennis as you wish at least once a week to do some sport. When you come back you still need to paint some stuff and after all that is almost eleven at the evening and now you can be artist! :-)
Not that I want to be artist, but I like to make nice photographs and I like to make better. So do not worry, even you didn't see a new picture in last week I am still here and still full of energy, maybe even more than before. I actually fix some stuff at web shop in lunch break today. It is going to be soon, when I will put it on-line.

Last days are long, when I come back from my daily job (yes I still make no much money with my photographs :-), I am busy for rest of the evening with fixing things in house. Work is progressing so I like it. And when I get in a bed, around midnight, I am opening this old book (Craft of Photography by David Vestal) from seventies about photography. It is such a nice pleasure to read it, it is about thinking before you shoot, develop and print. I like that a lot. Hopefully situation in our home will normalize after almost one month of rebuilding and I will be able again develop some films and print some nice images. I am looking forward to it.

I have got few ideas about small projects, but I am going to keep them for myself, hopefully some of them I will be able to produce and than it will be time for show off :-).

As I go further through this Dave Vestal book, I am realizing what mistakes I have made when doing this Fuji Neopan 1600 test. As you may remember, before bathroom strikes I was about to publish some test of Fuji Across 100. Now I need to do some more tests and prints to be really objective and gain as much as possible from it.
The thing I have noticed by reading the book is that David Vestal suggest to make prints of each exposed negative as good as possible and even make one print for best highlights and one for best shadow details. So he try to get as much as possible from each, even wrongly exposed, negative. When I was doing my Fuji Neopan 1600 test I gave to each negative the same exposure, at least that is what I remember. What I know for sure I didn't print the pictures. So I have something to fix here.

Back to Fuji Across 100. After all readings I have done and some mails I have received I have bought Rodinal today. I know you maybe smiling another developer and if you could know, as you can't, that I do not like Rodinal. It is only developer I am explicitly ignoring and today I have bought it.
Anyway I have also received my package with 30.5 meter of Fomapan 100 . So there is a plenty of work and fun in front of me.

It is already Monday, but I had no time yesterday and I think this is quite interesting. So Sunday we went to take a look at local photo club annual exposition in culture house. This Amateur photo club is making quite a noise in local media and in our village itself. I saw their exhibition two years ago and some photos were quite nice. Those were actually work of one man. This year I was walking between them and saw again same pictures of nice flowers and mushrooms, sometimes nice photos of mountains or exotic places. But all of them they look like photos from nice calendar, but they didn't tell me much further. I think I will get bored in few days if I put them on wall. Please do not take this arrogant view, but I do not feel very good about photo clubs. Most of them are pretty bad. I saw work and people in few photo clubs around and none of them really say anything to me. I believe that photography need mostly individual approach and only club with few members who are very open for discussion and open view can be useful. But those are probably not clubs but group of friends.
To be correct to our local photo club there was one man whose picture were above average and which I liked.

I am continuously amazed by the David Vestal book The Craft of Photography. Yesterday I have read last pages and found something which directly describing my feelings and probably quite well my position in photography. It is interesting that when you see such a thing written you immediately recognize it, but it is considerably more difficult to find it your self. I am lucky one that I found it so soon.
So what he is writing? I hope nobody will make me problems if I citate a bit:

What to Do? What to Do? By the time we learned technique but forgotten what it's good for there are two sensible ways to go.
Maybe Quit. One is to stop photographing, as many people do at this stage. (Others, less sensible, just go on repeating the mechanical motions over and over, for years, and wonder why they aren't happy about their pictures.)
Maybe Start Fresh. The second sensible course, and the one I recommend, is to start all over again, this time using your acquired skill to shoe the nature of the things you photograph and how you feel about them, in the strongest and most personal way. All resources are used to strengthen expression.

And somewhere else:

Call it art or call it photography the attitude that leads to strongest pictures is seldom "above" things. It's with them. With what you see and feel, not with what you think someone else wants. You have no way of knowing what others want.

And one more:

Pay attention to Yourself Start noticing how you feel about things you see, and you will soon know what to photograph and how to show it in your pictures.
The problem is to recognize your own photographic territory, which might be anything and anywhere. It can be a rational aim or irrational urge. One is as good as another

In these kind of situation I would need tele lens or good zoom. I must say I do not like to disturb people so even with my 50mm lens I try to make this as nice as possible. I am pretty satisfied even the couple is rather small, but on other hand I like all those walls made of stone. Portugal.

After longer time I made two prints this weekend. One I made on new paper I have ordered some weeks ago when I have run out of Hahnemuhle PhotoRag 308g. The new paper name is PermaJet Alpha 310g. I have bought also Omega which supposed to be the same paper but with a little brighteners and therefore less creamy and more whitish.
I have printed sand castle on it and it looks very good, incredible details and that plastic feeling thanks to blurred background and nice smooth texture of the papers.

I have found this on beach in small village in south of Portugal while taking first few shots of kids fishing. It was hidden and deserted in corner of small beach. When I was sic and we went with parents first time to the sea I made a millions of those with my sister. We were small and journey took three days. So when we were finally there nothing can stops us.

I have add new short article at my article page named Limiting print editions? about my view on limited editions of photographic prints. It is not theoretical text about how it should be or what I think about, but it is sort of information how I am selling my prints and how I feel about limited editions. Read it and tell me what do you think about it if you like, I believe that is honest and fair approach for me and for buyer of my prints.

My friend who has returned from trip in Canada is willing to borrow me his Canon 20D for a short test on Friday. He bought it about two month ago. I will be using 50/1.8 Canon lens with it. I am quite curious how it will compare with Nikon D70 I have borrowed also shortly about year ago.

I need to arrange some paper work to make my photography more official, especially now when I am preparing to open web shop with some prints for sale. I just want to do it right. I had small business before, back in Slovakia when I was doing for some time software development for different companies as freelancer. I never really understand much of this procedures. Now it is in front of me the same step but for me in foreign country. That makes it little bit more difficult.

For example I wanted to order very good boxes for delivering prints. I tried them before and they turns very good. I made order and than they called me to ask for my registration number. Well, I said, I do not have that. And result was that they can't deliver to me as they are delivering only to companies.

Friday, I have use Canon 20D for a few hours. I was curious how does it handles and how viewfinder looks. I made about 100 shots and use it for about four hours. It was very busy day for me and I have to say that Canon 20D doesn't make such a impression to me as Nikon D70 did about year ago. This doesn't mean that it is bad camera. I will write more soon.

I have worked today to produced best prints from different exposures of the same subject from test roll of Fuji Across I developed in Paterson FX-39 and Amaloco AM-74. It is a quite a work, but I am trying approach described in Dave Vestal book. I hope in few days I have prints ready and can do some investigation.

As you may know I am using Picture Window Pro (pwp) software for adjusting my pictures. I like this program very much. Is small fast and intuitive. It simple interface allows me to do everything I like directly without reading hundreds pages of manual. For a longer time I have a following problem:
If I use pwp to open any tif files which resides under 'My Documents' directory in WinXP it hangs, first before displaying open file dialog than before loading a file and same happens in saving. First it hangs If I change directory in save file dialog and it hangs before actual saving. Hanging last about 15-40 seconds and it consume 100% of CPU power.
I can open tif file on other directories without any delays but once I open tif file in any sub directory of 'My Documents' opening same files outside 'My Documents' produced the same delay/hanging behavior until I do not close and start pwp again.
This is pwp only behavior, I can use other software (irfan view or imatch) on the same tif file in 'My Documents' without any problems.

I do not know what is cause of this problem, maybe you know? For me is clear for now, I just do not use 'My Documents' for my pictures anymore.

I have printed nine A4 size prints from Fuji Across developed in Paterson FX-39 to see how different exposure effects details in shadows. But I did something wrong, all they look almost the same. I need to do cropping and print only part which contains shadow details. This part is rather small (about 10%) of picture and on A4 size I can't really see difference. I also could make a mistake that I didn't follow exactly description from Dave Vestal book and I gave extra modification to the picture using curves. I need to make just normal straight prints.
Well one can always learn something more.

Somehow I can't focus at my work. I remember when dave beckerman was writing about his time in 9-5 world (how he is calling it). I just can't go further. I seems to be locked here with tomorrow's deadline on my neck but no power to do anything. My mind is flying in totally different places.
Maybe you know all these things, but how to get out of it? Dave made it and now is free :-) For me is little bit more difficult, but one never know. So let's go and fight!
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I have just noticed that I have a little bug when generating this RSS feed. I have updated certain old items after broken link was indicated by handy soft. And now those items seems to be like the last one added. I need to fix that! Sorry for confusion.