Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

In the last day before we start our journey back to the Netherlands, I went in a huge snow storm, and with last roll in my camera to take some snowy shots. I used a roll completely, but I will be no surprised if nothing will be looking good. In heavy snow it is quite difficult to make any shots. In a next week I am going on short business trip to Stockholm again. I have a lot of rolls to developed. Again I have created quite a big backlog. I need to short it back and make things more transparent and clean.
I am glad we visit all the places and saw a lot of people. It brings to my thought different dimension and I am finding quite a joy in traveling and seeing places, which I didn't have before.

We are back from our Christmas trip through Czech and Slovak Republic as well as Poland. I am planning soon to develop some rolls. Even I have only few days free and than I am heading to Stockholm for three days.

I didn't, unfortunately, have any time for developing even a single roll. I am packed now again and today afternoon flying to Stockholm. Hopefully after I am back, things will get a bit more quiet. I need to organize things from last few weeks, develop about 15 rolls and do some printing.
My friend R. had some ideas how to increase sales of my work. We should talk about it a bit more. And all and all, I still need to learn a lot, don't I?

My second complete day in Stockholm. At Tuesday I arrived almost at midnight and was so tired that I just drop to the bed. Until today lunch time I didn't make any shot. First I was always out when was a dark and second I didn't feel like. Yesterday evening I visited my favorite Gallery Kontrast. I alway like to visit it. They have very often new expositions and most of the time very nice work could be seen there.
Today after lunch I went to walk around company buildings. I wanted to see after almost one year again the snowy amphitheater. And I wasn't disappointed! Kids made two snow mans there and I used one roll to try to catch it, the best I could. I would use more but I had only one roll with me :-)

I am back home and collecting energy to get into developing rolls which are waiting me over here. I hope I can make up some kind of plan and keep it to make work progressing. If that happen you will also notice, finally, some new photos published here.

I made break-through and developed first roll today. It is exposed in August on a beach of Bretagne in France is the one from my series of early morning shot of fisher-mans. You can read more about it in my journal from that time.

The roll turn out to be quite disappointment. It was early morning and with rangefinder I didn't managed to focus properly. It is a pity. So most of the roll is nothing.
I am preparing for Saturday again. Doing some more prints and maybe I will develop some roll Thursday or Friday if I am ready with printing.

Lately I had very nice discussion with R. about writing text and combine them with photographs. He can always create such a nice small stories. Full of mood and feelings. When I read them, I am always very inspired. All of them are in Slovak language so I can't really post them here. Maybe on Slovak version of this page, I will do. Later, when he agree and I'll make some nice pictures based on them. I really like that idea.

Just finishing last, the 9th print for tomorrow. I decided to pick up my old negatives from 1996 where I did one week workshop with Andrej Ban. It was about railways. And as far as I know tomorrow it will be about railways again :-)

I developed next roll of Neopan 400 this time in Aculux 2 diluted to 1:14. Aculux 2 becomes my developer of choice. After experience of previous film developed in 1:9, which turns out to be overdeveloped, I try 1:14 with same time 8:30. I am agitating by inversion only once per minute, except starting 30sec (when I keep inverting), and that wasn't enough for 1:14 dilution. Film seems to have quite low contrast. Next time I will do 2-3 inversions per minute.

Just scanning roll developed yesterday some nice shots there. Will try to get them on-line as soon as I'll get some time.
I developed next roll in 1:14 Aculux 2 for 8:00 min (20C) agitation every minute 2-3 times for about 8-10 sec. It is hanging now and it looks OK. Can't say right now if contrast was increased, but definitely negative is not as dense as when I developed using 1:9.
I am just wondering why are times published by Paterson so off? Are they using so much different way of developing films? Are exposure so much off?

Maybe you wondering why I am not recently adding new pictures. Don't I have any? Well I have quite a lot of new photographs. Problem is somewhere else. From the time I had start using IMatch (great soft btw) I am dreaming to integrate updating my web from this software right a way. My own made soft for that is using XML-RPC and I just love to connect those two together and sent pictures from IMatch to my server using XML-RPC. Well and that is the reason. I am not done with that yet.
I did update a little my pages. Lower number of thumbnails to six per page and other small changes.

From today is my web site only in English language. For most of you it could be surprise. You ask, where was the other language? Well it was there, for all those years back to 1997 these pages were in English and Slovak language. You could switch it by changing language preferences in your browser.
It was too much for me to keep all text in both languages, and than, the Slovak version suffers, as the English one gets updated almost every second day.
I believe this change will be only for good.

I am in Stockholm again. already from Monday, but I am quite busy so no time to write anything. Unfortunately I wasn't sure how long I am going to stay here so I didn't take any photo stuff except my camera. Before I travel here, I thought I will have some time to develop some rolls, but I gave up that. I better do it home and the right way.
It is nice and snowy here. Feels like real winter. Not very cold. I am all day in company so I can see outside world only in dark and that makes taking pictures little bit difficult. But I will see, maybe I'll have some time for it as well.

Busy, busy. Today was a first day I took my camera with me. All other days was always dark when I could. Today I went with T. to small city Trosa. The weather was very bad, cloudy, rainy and quite windy. This city is more summer one like winter. So a lot of things were closed, but nice small river which goes through it, together with nice color houses is still giving us nice feelings and atmosfere of Sweden countryside.
We walked into small café to warm up and get some warm drinks and than we continue by side of the river. In such a weather I do not expect to get great shots, but anyway I did quite of them. Mostly shots without people, as there were not so many of them either :-) I tried to catch that feeling of small village in cold winter. Something I still have in my mind after reading "Doctor Zivago" by B.Pasternak early this week.