Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

We arrived some three hours ago back home. I am tired driving 1300km in 13 hours. I need some sleep. I have a lot of rolls exposed, I spoke with lot of nice and interesting people. So shortly a lot of things to share, but not today. Talk to you all later... Enjoy your weekend.

After reading once again what they wrote about my web site in UK Black and white magazine, I have smile on my face. Borat :-) Well at least you have some fun. I do my best ;-)
Few of my friends wrote me about this reference to Borat. They generally said that it is not fair, but they hope it was meant in positive way. I do not really care. I am glad that they mentioned my web page.

Actually I would really like to know who let Alice Burton know about my site, was it you? Let me know I am really curious. In any case, thank YOU very much!

As you may know I was in Japan this summer. I was there from my job as a coach/trainer for Philips Medical Systems. I was giving lessons to Philips Service Engineers there. We had very nice time and I have learned a lot about Japanese culture. At the end of my stay I have got presents, one of them is a signature stamp. This stamp has my name in Japanese language and such stamps are used in Japan as replacement for signatures. Especially those ones who are custom made and has certificate of originality.

The one I have received as a present is a such a one. It comes in extremely nice cover which is meant to be carried all the time with me.

I have decided to use this stamp as my signature to stamp all photographs produced by me. Here is the image which is produced by this stamp.

We live in a rather middle sized village in south of Netherlands, close to Belgium border. People living around us are various, mostly Dutch. We are one of the few foreigners living in this part of village. From time to time I meet our neighbors. We chat for a while about normal boring things like weather, you know it all. Once a year in summer we have barbecue together, and that is it. With few we meet more often and we talk about more interesting things.

Day before yesterday, quite later in the evening, I was watching TV with Viera. Somebody was ringing at the door. Viera said: "it is for you", so I went and open the door. And there was our indirect neighbor F and he starts right a way:

"I was just looking at your web site. And I must say I love your pictures. You know there is such a calm and quietness coming out of them. And when I look at the Bridge to Nowhere II, man! I have got the goose bumps. I was looking at that image for a while and than I decide to come to you right a way. I just need to have that, it is so great. I mean I know people, they all can make images, but looking at the ones from you and experience this calmness. It is just great! How big can you make it for me?...."

And we chat for some 15 minutes more. I was very much surprised, first I would never expect from him to look at my images, second it is very unusual here in Netherlands (at least around here) that somebody will come just like that without first calling to your house later at the evening. This spontaneous reaction just completely surprised me. I mean people (and even people I would expect from) are rarely expressing them selfs feelings about my work.
I would like to thank F. for expressing his view on my work especially that he did it such a nice way. Such a moments are really the ones why one is creating anything.

I didn't write much this week, but I was rather busy. Just now I have developed third set of films and that means I have now 18 rolls developed from summer period of traveling.
I also come to situation when I used the last bottle of Paterson Aculux II. The era of Aculux is over now from me. Last three films are developed in Fotospeed FD10, great developer. My feeling is that it is actually better than Aculux. I have bought before summer two canister for 5 liters.

I know that this is probably not much of interest to most of you, but I write this a bit also for me. So please bear with me.
You may know tha I was using my old Palm IIIxe as timer for developing my films. Well I had all my database of times there so I can conveniently select film and developer and it was preset for the time I was using for that particular combination. Somehow I left it over the summer and battery died taking with it also all my timings. Well, I have stored for each film I ever develop, used timing in my photo management software, IMatch, so nothing is really lost.
But after this and also to avoid some unpractical issue with driving Palm with stylus or pouring developer over its screen, I decided to by hardware timer. I bough bloody expensive one. almost 30 euro, with two independen timers and nice big numbers. It is a pleasure to work with it.

So I am happy, this week quite a few films developed, new timer, new developer and all looks very good. Soon enough you will see some new images.

Did you had nice last lazy Augusts Sunday? Days are turning one after each other. Day after day and only sometimes, if at all, one stays and think. What did it happen in this days, part of our time, here. Until we vanish.

I had nice last Saturday and Sunday in August. The Sun was shining and I enjoyed a last bit of it. Did a lot of nice things. Going to sleep now and looking forward to tomorrow.

So do not let your hours slip to nowhere, enjoy it! They will never come back!

I made some small and I guess useful changes on my web site. Now on front page also comments to journal entries are shown. Not only to photos. This also means than individual news items can be shown directly and not only by date.
I am thinking rather for a long time about changing design of my pages. I think to do this once a while is refreshing. Problem is that I do not know really how I would like them to be looking. I surely would like to show bigger pictures and have it all with little bit more mood. I would be happy pages where creating feeling similar my pictures are creating. Something which would make it all play together.
I must say I love possibilities of flash, but I was for a long time against using it on pages. Tell me how do you see using flash on web page as a user, viewer. Do you have any problems with flicker, for example?

Today I shipped first print signed with my Japanese signature stamp. As usually all my prints have on back small sticker with photo information like number, edition, name and my address. Now they are also stamped and signed. Take a look, this is how part of the image back looks:

I must admint I am not very satisfied with images I am making in last few month. The exposition whcih is going to held this year autumn in Slovak Republic and possibly it repetition here in The Netherlands is for me kind of end of this era. What I like to is create more sureal photograph. Images which creates thinking and viewing experience. Something far fromdocumentary. Creating of hypothetical situations, Situations which could happen (and they do, I am sure about it) somwhere in in some minds or places. But they are so rare that most of the people have no idea that they are real.
While driving today morning over the fogy fields in our country side I was inspired by the meadow of wet grass, lit by just rising Sun. Image of lady looking with sensual face to the camera. She is party captured from very close on left side of the frame. On a right side behind her, lit by the Sun from behind, two mans dressed in strange black suits are playing cards on small table.

I actually liked to write this already morning, but I have forgot (that happen very often, unfortunately). So, I like to thank to Alex Soth. He reminds me that idea of mine when I was reading his blog entry and at the end of it I saw this image:


photo by Marissa Long and Andy McMillan

Today is my active day, probably I am inspired by the sale from yesterday ( thanks D! ;-) ).
I have add new article about the way I am packing my photographs when sending them to a customer who order some. I wrote this some time ago for my eBay home page. Only now I realized that it could be handy to have that also here.
So if you didn't see it already, now you can read it here in article section, which is now by default sorted from fresh new article to the older ones.

Yesterday I realize that colleague of mine who is also coach and trainer , is using hardware calibration of the monitors in his class. So I have borrowed one yesterday. First I have calibrate my notebooks LCD, just for fun to see how installation and process of calibration is working. Than I took it home and I have calibrate my CRT monitor on which I am doing photo editing. It all when all right and next few days will show how useful this was. I can say immediately that improvement is visible in two things. Display is now lighter and cooler. I see more details in dark areas.
What surprised me though, is the fact that colors are different between my notebook's monitor and my CRT's monitor. I believe that calibration is only black and white and therefore white point and color balance is not changed by this calibration.
It is not problem for me at all as I do black and white photos, but as I am also now in process of selecting new color scheme for my web I realize how different these colors are when looking at my site on LCD and on CRT.

Anyway I am glad that I have now access to calibration tool for monitor and I can recalibrate every week if I like. Now only I need to put at work the densitometer I have bought already some month ago. This way I would be able to calibrate my scanner for negatives and also my print output.
p.s.: sorry for this technical blog entry, but somehow I feel I need to share this...

This is second day when I can't reach eBay from multiple geographical locations. Same thing happen yesterday. I have also reports from other people that eBay is very slow, connections timeouts. Well I have there listings I payed for and my potential customers (if any) can't get to them. For a service you pay you somehow expect to be working, right? Or do I expect too much?