Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

This print will come later today. I am and was really busy yesterday. I'll be back in few hours to bring you some new shots, ideas and free print.

After rain, no kids around. Loosing color with drops of water. Waiting to be turned again...

Once a while these kind of things happen. Yes it did to me yesterday. So my main PC, where I do work on images is not bootable anymore. Boot disk is corrupted. The other disk which is holding all images and my work is ok (at least I hope :-), but when I actually find my ghost image backup I can restore boot disk.
I already ordered new disk, better faster bigger so I will use that for all, but also I will switch to new main board and increase speed of my PC by some 25%. It all would go rather faster, but we are preparing for some (next) house rebuild and this week I am following course and that is why all my responses are a bit slower, please excuse me for it.

Today morning I saw girl in age about seven, trying to path road on her way to school. She looks like first time alone on a bike riding to the school.
She had that kind of enthusiastic look in her eyes. The look of proud and determination. She was happy that she can do it alone and she was very careful to path main road. I stopped for her and than she ride in front of me, with that spark in eye, telling me: "Look I can do it alone and I love it!"
It was great to see, something you often loose with age. I find it really pity. So let's try to keep that shine in our eyes...

After incredible good course of vmWare I had these four days I am back. I have to prepare for course I am giving in 10 days. As addition we are beginning next week with rebuilding our living room. So that will be all and all quite a mess.
I either case I will try to balance my time I need to really finish those 20 prints at www.richard-vanek.eu and present them. I also have some more prints to do I promised to certain people. And yes free print for June, still not up. I know I know...

So after few days my computer is back in life again. I installed new hard disk, restore ghost image and installed some additional software. All seems to be working ok again. I didn't loose anything just time. I decided to take advantage of this HDD crash and did few improvements in organization of my tools.
From Wednesday our home will be upside down. Well it is already now as we need to clean up all background floor to make space for rebuilding which is going to start Wednesday. It supposed to be for two weeks. Than few days and we off for holiday.

As everybody I guess, I also do browse and look at photo work of other photographers. When I like them I add them to my RSS reader. What has happened quite a few times in last two or three months is that I removed some of them after while. It is really interesting how work of somebody else gets monotoning and boring after seeing more pictures. I should watch myself, otherwise I remove my own RSS feed :-)

In a last few days eBay sales went quite down so I need to reduce. I decided to remove small 5x7 prints from my store in next few days. I already removed two and I will continue. I am keeping 8x10 and 11x14 prints. I may reduce amount of those as well.

This eBay experiment started quite well but I do not sell enough to keep money balance. So after reduction of prints I may rise prices.

Well thing happens and if I can't earn I surely do not like to loose. So I'll see how things go and I may just good come back to my web shop which costs me nothing.

When I had this problem with my PC and I have upgrade CPU from 2.0GHz to 2.4GHz I though maybe it a time to do something I always wish. Upgrade the memory. So I did now I have 2GB and with this silent disk from Samsung I almost do not hear my PC. And things are just flying.
I like it very much of course. Just pity I can't really do much now as tomorrow rebuilding of our house begins. I was busy today with taping covering and moving all stuff from ground floor.
And I started to play with eBay match ups as well. You do not know what it is. Well quite funny, you get presented question with two options, two picture and you vote. I took it bit more seriously than most of those people there. I decided to let people decide what pictures will go in and which pictures leave my eBay store.

Take a look on few from mine. Or just take a look on this latest one:

Hi, I made few match ups with connection to my photography work to find out what people prefer and what they like more. I have some results after two days. Not that it is any representative investigation, but it give indication. You can join and express you opinion, I would appreciate that. One requirement is to have eBay account.
For example this is a result on question about buying prints with or without passepartout (matted or not)

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And here is a opinion expressed about carbon and classical tone of the same image:

Even after my HDD on PC crashed few days ago I experience another disaster and it was my USB drive. For who knows what kind of reasons complete fat32 system gets corrupted. I have on it portable application with browser, mail, chat and more. I carry this with me and just plugging it in any computer with windows. I have than all my common software, email, history, chat at my hand. So it is really cool.
There is of course risk if it goes wrong all is in the hell. And that happen yesterday. Actually it was behaving quite suspicious already for few days. But yesterday things when really wrong.

But I have backups! So here we go after 30min of restore action all is back in normal! So guys do backups! Really even you never had problem, do not you worry the day WILL come.

I have updated my article describing how do I make my prints. It includes part of image modification and preparation for print.

I didn't write anything this weekend. I have scanned last five rolls and made some small changes at presentation of my eBay store.

Most of the time I was busy with garden (new fence) and inside house. As you may remember the construction changes in our ground floor should start last week Monday, but they actually started today. I hope when I come back home today, house will be not full of dust. Especially I am afraid for my scanners and printers. I covered all, but dust is a ..... it gets everywhere.

I just received picture of my image from Japan. So my pictures seems to be now in Europe, Asia, North and South America. I am missing Australia, Africa and Antarctica, anybody ? :-)

I am increasing prices on eBay. I already limited number of prints in shop to leave only the best once. Prices in my shop here are higher and I have no costs (except PayPal) with them. eBay is charging me quite some money and I am loosing.
So we go up!
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As a connection with it I will make easier to shop in my web shop here on piskoftak.com. I will try to limit need to login and similar things. But for that I need some extra time. So I guess that will be somewhere in July.

I have no idea what happened, but after I raised prices yesterday I sold two prints from eBay and one in my own web shop here.
That is nice, so in this weekend time for packing!

After rather successful week I needed to print few images. Well five actually. Four of smaller (8x10 and A4) size and one bigger (A3). Because of house rebuild I had my computer and printer off for about week. Printer with those special carbon pigments is rather sensitive to fact to be turned off and not used for some time. When I turn it on, i need to do some cleaning cycles and than need to fill new inks.
That took some time and printer need to rest. Problem arrived when I need to reset chips on cartridges to indicate printer that they are full again. I am using this reseter for over five years and just this week batteries in it decided to give up. Not big deal I could print even printer would complain that there is no ink anymore. But i feel rather uncomfortable anyway. I could buy these batteries in our village. I almost give up when my seven year old daughter ask me why I am so sad. When I explain she come with small light and four small batteries, exactly those I needed for my tool! Sweet girl!

Well make it short. Printer start nicely working I printed small prints and when for bigger one. After it was done, good 15 minutes, there were marks from wheels on the print! I never had that, Not sure why I do have it now. Absolutely not. I made hundreds maybe more prints with it and never had it.
I looked up on Internet that my favorite MIS is selling small gizmo to lift wheels and avoid these marks. I looked in detail on picture and find out that I may be able to make them myself. And yes I did. So I could nicely print bigger prints as well.

One more note. So far I was using PermaJet ALPHA, 100% Cotton Rag paper. In last two or so month I am experimenting with Epson Premium Semigloss Paper. It has superior contrast and blacks are deeper when comparing to PermaJet paper. It is just not so heavy. I may try some other paper, but this excellent paper from Epson is also very archival. Just ideal, pity it is not 310g/m^2

After I made my prints I decided to remake them on the same paper. They are great, I love them. So people who bought print last weeks will receive two versions. I am really curious what they will tell me, which one they think is better.

So that was all from photo department, on a house rebuilding we use most of the time this weekend.

Our house rebuilding is getting to the final point. I am happy, very satisfied with the person who does that. He is doing incredible job and he is very nice and communicative person. All is going far better than expected.
I am giving course this week, so I have no time for anything else. Waking up at 5:30 at 7:00 at work prepare a bit arrange what needed from 9:00 lessons are staring until 16:30. Than some more work and than heading home. I arrive home around 18:00-18:30, eat something and than cleaning and sometimes some small things to adjust, check, fix.
I get in bad around midnight, sometimes little earlier. In this rather hectic time I do not have much extra space for writing here anything. So please excuse me. Sunday we are heading for one week of small holiday.

And one more look at the bench. In early spring morning, grass is still wet and air so cold.