Richard Vanek - Black and White Photography

Few weeks ago I was asked to write feedback for three images in Benelux photo magazine ZOOM, together with some tips. Images and tips where focus on street photography. It was nice as I like to do this quite regularly for other people. In last few days magazine is in newsstands and I have received my copy as well. Here is a crop from first two pages.

Not sure, but you may know that I am long time listener of Pink Floyd music. Always when I hear their music I am amazed how strongly it influence me and how they manage to connect the great music with power of expressing ideas by it.
Yesterday I was with Viera at concert performed by Roger Waters at his Dark Side of The Moon tour 2008. It starts in very nice sunny day and warm temperature. First hour with old songs and some very old songs. I enjoyed it very very much. Songs from Ummagamma and Final Cut as well as from Animals and other albums. At the bigging it seems that not many people will attend. When we arrived and hour before announced start half of the open place was more or less empty and I hoped I can enjoy music sitting on the grass. Well at the time show starts complete place was full of standing people. It was amazing!
Second part start a bit non standard by the song from the middle of The Dark Side Of The Moon album and than some other songs follows. I felt that it was no complete, but I like it very much. Singing of the solo vocalist woman was amazing as was a saxophone from this album.
All and all it was amazing evening and another one from few which do have effect on my and convincing me that such a thing are possible and they do have a reason. Yesterday evening I felt fully powered with ideas and imagination which I carry now in me, hopefully for the time necessary to realization of them.

I did realize few days ago that there where couple of errors in user interface of my photography store. I use this web store for online sale of my prints. I hope I have corrected all problems, which were introduced when my web hosting provider upgraded to the MYSQL version five.

I would really appreciate if you can inform me on a problem you find in my store. In case it will be a real problem I am offering 10% off fro your next purchase in my store. This offer is valid until end of the May 2008.
Thank you for your support and help

I just published first version of my new article about my experience with short test. This test was to give me a feel what kind of impact on my work-flow will have using digital camera.
You can read article following this link.

Heat and wet from field. Noise of insect in the grass. Burning Sun above my head. Sweat dropping from my nose.

I was standing there just waiting when the hour will start and than I covered my head while whole body was shaking and vibrating.

The other day I had discussion with friend and idea of creating summer photo courses come to discussion. I had that idea for a longer time, but never really though in details about it. As a professional trainer coach I played with idea of giving photo lectures for some time. Also my last article in Dutch ZOOM magazine was about giving feedback on people's photos.
As we discussed my friend has pointed out that better than making a specialize course for wanna be professionals, far better would be give some two day course to holiday people. Show them how they can make their holiday pictures far better. I like that idea very much. These day almost everybody has a camera and there are very few technical limitation to capture an image.

I am currently preparing first of such a course where I will show simple ideas not only about how best to use your own camera, but also information about composition, choosing a subject and way to aproach it. Basic ideas about adjusting image on computer and practical picture taking with personal advice at the time of shooting will be given. Than reviewing taken images at the end of the day and giving personal advice.

I would appreciate if you could drop me a note with your though about this. Plan is to have few of these lecture this summer already in NL, FR, BE and possibly UK as well. Depends how I succeed to create contacts with holiday places in those countries and they interest.

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Some time ago J., one of the regular readers of my web site send me two images and ask me for opinion. I am taking this opportunity to give J, feedback and showing you what could be part of the course. Here comes the original image as I receive it:

When I look at an image, mine or from others, first think I look at is composition. Some basic issues are presented on this image.

• Assuming primary object, the dry out tree is placed in center. That creates rather boring and common feel from the image. Is always better to place primary subject not in center. There are always exceptions, but than the subject and composition requires that. Here it is not the case.
• The disturbing tree on left side is usurping our attention. It is keeping us from observing the primary subject and taking space. I learned that photography is about making choices and removing things. At the point when there is nothing to be remove without destroying the subject of the photograph, image is final and ready to be published.
• For landscape shots like this it is alway good when sky and landscape dividing the image horizontally to two no-equally big parts. 2:3 is preferred. Here they are almost 1:1 and that creates again very common and boring effect to the observer.

The image technical quality is the other item I look at when image is chosen from compositional point of view. It means when I see that image has potentional from the idea in it and in its own composition I judge the technical level of the image to see if it can be adjusted to bring most of the information.

• We see on this original image that foreground is very dark. Cause of this very common problem is when camera measures light coming from light background. Than it tries to avoid over exposure (which is unsuccessful on this image - right upper corner). Lot of can be adjusted on computer, but far better is to make first the best exposure we can. There are few methods to do than. In this case I would suggest to move position of camera bit to the right and point it to the left. By this tree on right side can be avoided as well as bright sun from the same direction. Some more issues could be resolved by changing of camera position. Using computer I lighten foreground and darken the bacground
  
• As a result of underexposure the color saturation is suffering. Again I aded a bit of that using computer.
  
  Increasing of contrast is also very useful to bring a bit of life to the image. As all of these adjustments this one particularly need to be used carefully.
  

Now we see far better what can this image bring us. By simple crop we can solve compositional problems mentioned in first part of this text. Following is final image which place primary object out of the center and removing disturbing tree on right side.
By cropping out part of the sky we divide image to two un-equal parts between sky and landscape. This also remove burned out sky on right side of the image.


I hope this is useful to some of you and I hope J. is not mad at me for reworking her image. I would like to stress that all steps I did in post processing can be done, with far better result at the time image was taken. When one is going through process I just described often, it becomes natural to thing same way at the time of taking picture. Post processing can than give us other freedom to manipulate image in artistic way to underline our own vision. About that I can write some other time.
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I wish you all nice time .

Summer 2006, South of Czech Republic, what to say more?

My friend J. send me another image and asked me for opinion. With her permission I am including my answer here, with hope it can be useful to some more. Later I may extend this article by adding some tips and examples.

Looking at your image apart from fixing dark part (look at attached image), there is not much from technical point of view to make better.

Nice is how tree and stones in foreground frame the hills on horizon.

However there is one fundamental problem with this image. That problem is very common and it is one of the most difficult to fix.

It is about how our brain works when looking and the scene. Our brain filter automatically unimportant things from the scene and place emphasis on the items in scene which we find important.

Photo camera is not able to do it. So when we take picture of something we find interesting, later by looking at the print we realize that there are too many things and a lot of them is disturbing. We find out that the one or few items important to us are lost in the image. Other people looking at the same image do not know why we took image. They do not know what we saw important on that image.

So art of making good image is to filter out at the time of exposure what is important and what is not by making the right composition.

We can make it partially later by darkening and lightening of part of image to put focus on important thing.

On your image however I have no idea what was the important thing why you took this image. There is too many things. Stones on left part of the image, hills at the horizon.

So I can not use darkening and lightening technique to make change which would put focus on one or very few items with the most important in image.

Some images do not have focus point, but in that case they contain extremely few objects and actually creates more poetical feeling that documentation value.

This is a continuation of my article from yesterday about how to create image with defined area of interest.

As I wrote in it, one of the most common problem with photos is that there is too many object in the scene. At the time of capturing image our subconsciousness filter out unimportant ones out. A camera has not such a capability.
In a following example I will use an image from Richard Brouwer, with permission. His image is typical example. Example when nice moment is captured in environment which is impossible to control right a way. Post processing is only way how to filter out unimportant and disturbing part of the image and let important objects stand out.

I create image with the same dimensions as original image and call it mask. Different software has different ways of creating this mask. I will not describe these differences and details. I will try to describe just a principle. Using mask I made selection which part (black) is important and which is not (white) on the original photo.

Mask gives me possibility to adjust only part of the image. In this case I will adjust part which is white. My changes will be not applied on parts which are black.
Than by shifting levels (darkening) original image through this mask only parts which are white on mask become darker. It works like darkening image through filter. Very similar what is done in darkroom when by exposing more light to the certain places on image to make them darker (burning image).
When you look at resulting image it is clear that the observer focus is brought to the normal - lighter parts first. Image also become simpler and easier to comprehend. It is clear what author wanted to say. Disturbing elements are also filtered out.
Masks could be used for all modification which is relevant to only part of the image. Like sharpening only edges, blurring, contrast modifications. So in principle any operation you could do on whole image you could do on part of the image when applied it through the mask. Whole art is that to know which part and be able to create mask which covers it.

Good luck!

It has been while, almost two years when Barborka made this image. I am jealous. I discover it today and I love it. You may have different taste, but for me this is the one.

After I took a shower I was back in room, but I was not alone, there was a face in window and sharp Sun.