Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

So here we have a new year. I am starting with little new and I hope better design of these pages. Not everything is completely finished, so please be patience and let me know if you find something not fully working. I will in next few days add missing site map and about pages and also will introduced new layout of photo pages in project and recent page.

I have developed some rolls I have exposed with flash and also some with pushed Neopan 400 to 800 asa. All those were little experimenting and both developed with Paterson Aculux 2. Those Neopans I have already scanned but seems like highlights get blowed. It is not big problem as I was doing all shots inside of dark room and outside was bright sunny day. The brightness difference was huge. What is shot inside is nice, I must tell you that I am quite surprised. I have even feeling that results is better that Neopan 1600 @ 800.
The other two films were Fuji Across, one exposed in dance theater with flash and outside in daylight. These two I have to still scan. With flash one looks very contrasty, outside looks great. Let see after scan.

After experience from yesterday I decided to try out developer I used once with very good result. I only left it because is powder and quite expensive. For 15 films around 10-14 euros. Tetenal Emofin is the name. It is two bath developer which has two very nice features. It is compensating developer and also well suited for pushing sensitive films even more. So exactly what I need for my test of Fuji Neopan 400 exposed at 1600. I also like to test Fuji Across exposed with flesh to see if I can get less contrasty negatives with more shadow and highlight details than I have got yesterday with Paterson Aculux 2.
One thing I have to tell you. Doing this continuous 3s inversions with this developer is ok up to 4+4 minutes (so it means 8 minutes in total), but for Neopan 400@1600 I needed to do it 9+9 minutes. So 18 minutes of constant rotation. I did it in 5 sec interval but it is in reality non-stop.
And results? Well I will be scanning tomorrow but this Neopan 400@1600 looks good. And Across? It definitely have more detail and lower contrast. Maybe next time I will do it longer 4+4 as I did only 3+3 today. I tell you more tomorrow. It is definetely interesting.

Morning, the last day of previous year, Hape Smeele called me. I was very glad that I hear him as I was planning to meet him and Caroline Schroeder soon. What was my surprise when he asked me if I do not want to make some pictures from some theater like new year party of certain company. I have to arrange few things and today I was there.

I was taking pictures from around 12:00 until 17:00 and as light goes down it become more and more difficult. Not only that but around 16:00 I was already so tired of paying attention to all things that I need double coffee.
Now I have first four rolls in tank ready to be developed. I was planning to use Fuji Neopan 1600 but I could not find it in such a short time so I used Fuji Neopan 400 exposed at 800 and Kodak TMZ exposed at 1600. But I need to first take some sleep I can barely stand. Quite surprise I must say.

Whole session was very intensive. I need to follow stories, watch out for background and light and try not to eclipse player before public. Quite funny was that I had almost same dress (black) as the players so quite a few people thought that I am just playing with them :-)

I have shot few different things in last few weeks and have not print much of it. I hope I can make things up. I made shooting on one party where I used first time my SB-28 flash. A lot of nice shots for people there I believe. Than I made some shots on my daughter ballet presentation at the end of the year. And that yesterdays session. And I have also few things I promised and are hanging on me for long time. I need to finishes all of this before I go to next photo session. So I will be, so called 'closed in darkroom' for some time now :-) I hope it will bring me energy for better shooting than!

I didn't tell you that, but I have new obsedancy. I have found out that I can receive Slovak and Czech locale TV station and few more over satellite here. I am completely hook up with the idea to be able to see again things I liked there. So I am reading a lot about digital satellite receivers, LNBs, cables, dishes, coding cards and all those things. Trying to get into it and understand so I can make good choice when I will buy one such a sets. It always surprised me how things are complicated and choice is not easy when you jump to the topic you never heard about before. Years ago I remember my friend has analog satellite receiver for free to air stations.

I had a tough week. Last three days at work I have some courses which are very enjoyable but on other hand they took a lot of my energy. I am tired. I was planning to develop last rolls from Monday session.

When I am talking about developing. Recently I have developed my favorite one year expired Maco up100 plus in Tetenal Emofin. That film I also shot with my new flash SB-28. Using compensating developer, like Emofin, is a great advantage when you expecting high contrast shot. Shot done using flash tend to be contrast, hard shadows. Emofin in combination with Maco film is nice. You can hardly tell that there were any flash used in those shots.

I know, I know it is a long time when I put some new photos on web. I am recently very busy with developing and scanning. Soon I will have new things to publish. Maybe also some from my Monday session if customer agree.

I am using Tetenal Emofin developer recently for pushing Fuji Neopan 400 and also to compensate developing on shots which were done with strong back light. I am very happy with results I am getting. One thing I noticed very soon was that this developer is much more aggressive chemical than anything I used before. After developing my first few rolls I destroy rubber I had on ground and have some mark on table and washing machine. I start using rubber hand gloves.

I developed today Kodak TMZ 3200 exposed at 1600 in Tetenal Emofin. Reason why I did it was that I know thats hots contains very strong back light and I like compensating effect of Emofin. I couldn't find any time anywhere so I used 4+4 minutes in constant agitation. I may do 5+5 next time. But let see how scanning ends up.

I am looking again on scan of Maco done with flash developed in Emofin. They look very good. Some shots contains three different light situations. Strong flash exposure, total dark parts not lit with any light a nd that window with direct Sun. All part have details in it, amazing.

Today I had quit busy day. I finished scanning of last negatives and than I made first selection from Monday session. Now I have this selection printed and need some time to look at it.

From today you can also put my RSS feed to your feed reader. It will be updated any time I add something to my journal or I add new picture. So you can monitor my site using you RSS feed reader. Address to my feed is http://www.piskoftak.com/rss.xml.

For very long time I was bothered by noise of my computer. When I bought it five years ago it was quite top line machine with two CPU Pentium III and 1GB memory. It has fan on each CPU plus one fan blowing air in big tower case and one on power supply to take it out. About two month ago I have bought silent cooler for one of the CPU. It helps but I can't use it for second as well because a size. Those two coolers didn't fit next to each other.
Yesterday I install monitoring soft and I saw that temperature on my CPU are all far below 30C and temperature in case is about 25C. I decide to stop big fan for air taking into case. That lower the noise quite a lot and increase temp in case only by one degree of Celsius. The next step I did was disconnecting the old noise fan from CPU1. Temperature raised on 46C on full loaded CPU for about 30minutes.

Now I have very low noise PC and still cooled enough. Next step which I plan is install copper passive coolers on both CPUs if the fit. I have found nice from Zalman. Just have to be sure that they can fit next to each other.

I have got e-mail asking me more about how I develop Neopan in Paterson Aculux 2. I have wrote so long answer, which I can believe can be useful to somebody else as well.

I am using Neopan for quite some time (few years) and with Aculux 2 for about two years. You can search my journal for Neopan and you will get a lot of links. Use google for search using this term "Neopan site:piskoftak.com"

I have found Aculux 2 very good developer for this film. It gives me very nice tonal range and good contrast. Because it is one shot developer I can reproduced results by 100%. I am using destilate water to dilute it 1:9. I always develop 2 films in my tank using 550ml of liquid and inversions are following:
after puring liquid in I start clock and inverting non-stop for the first 15 seconds. Than on start of each minute I do one slow inversion which take about 4-5sec. By inversion I mean twisting tank bottom up and back. I develop like this 12 minutes if there was low contrast subject. (like shots in rain, or grey weather), if the shots were done on bright sun with higher contrast I develop only for about 10 minutes.

I need to tell you one think what I observe. Before I used Olympus OM-2n camera and now I use Nikon F80. On both cameras I mostly use aperture priority mode. OM-2n is using central weighted exposure metering on F80 I am using 3D matrix metering. The second (Nikon) exposing less than OM-2n did. My negatives are better now with F80. Easier to scan and still having enough details in dark parts. So all and all you need to try it yourself. I would suggest you shoot one film in subject and light you normally used. Rate film as normal 400 ASA and develop it for 12 minutes. You will see if you than need shorter the time or it is ok.

Can you tell me what is your IE and development time with this film and developer. I didn’t find this information in the article “Developing b&w negatives “.Do you think your development time can be compatible with printing with condenser enlarger?

Yes I am sure it will. I am scanning my films and therefore prefer little less density which is the same what condenser enlarger likes too.

Recently I did a lot of shots in difficult high contrast light, where I needed do shoot dark subject on light background (people in front of window). It was rather dark inside I use Neopan 400 and rated it at 800 and few times even 1600. I used Tetenal Emofin two bath developer to do two things:

- push the film to 800 and 1600
- compensate high contrast exposure


In both goals Emofin Tetenal excels. I have got good negatives and light and dark parts where nicely compensated so contrast was lowered and details in highlight and in shadows kept. Of course grain is more than as exposed at 400, but still acceptable. This is just side note which can be useful or you.

I do not know what kind of photography your are doing, but this can be handy once for you. Tetenal Emofin is German produced developer, which is rather expensive and I find it very very reactive with skin and everything around. Marks on everywhere where it drops. Be careful. Paterson Aculux 2 is much easier and I had no problem with it and is also very economical.

Hands, I always was fascinating by people's hands. You can see and deduct a lot of things from them. Once I was at exhibition of an photographer. He has made as addition to conventionally placed photos, one tunnel where photos where just glued one next to other. One wall of that tunnel was full of hands. I liked that very much. This shot was done when I was taking pictures for a client. Whole day I did a lot of different shots, but for myself I did this and few more. Just for geeks, this is done on Fuji Neopan 400 push to 800 developed in Tetenal Emofin.

I preparing first preview from shots I did for client. It is quite a lot of work. Originally I though it will take me about two weeks, but now it seems like more. I hope you could see first broad selection about end of this week. From this selection the final selection of ten to fifteen photographs will be made.

I have end participation of this web site in black and white photo ring. I removed it from there. For the last four month I didn't receive almost any hits from there. At the beginning it was quite nice, but as time went further nothing really improved, just opposite. I am still looking for a way to improve visibility of my site to increase number of visitors. I was shortly considering banner exchange program, but I am not very sure about efficiency of such a step.

I have start adding pictures which I took for client about two weeks ago, to the special gallery. At first it will contains around 30 shots as a wider selection. This is planned to be size down to about ten shots. The reason why I make it public, is to allow some friends to let me know opinion, for others to see process and for client to be informed. I take it as kind of experiment and let's see how it is going to turn out. Whole process shouldn't take more than week.

After a busy week I have a little time to focus back on my photographs. I received very good feedback for my session photos. Also huge load on web site. First time load on site break point of 2500 pages served per day which was almost 10000 hits in one day.

When Sun was shining so hard that everything has it most bright colors I was always surprised that white walls can still be whiter and keep their surface's details.Such a buildings as these always brought me memories from my childhood, when I was reading stories from foreign countries. This shot is from south of Portugal, Algarve.