Photography

I have been involved with photography since I was thirteen years old, when my father gave me an old twin lens Rolleiflex. I learned the dark room craft at school from amateur parents who shared it with kids out of love of photography, and later advanced it with my dear friend Jan Hynek, who taught me a lot about composition, patience and precision. He is now working professionally as a custom printer in Vancouver.

I traded my piano for a Practica and a couple of lens when I was nineteen, and bought a couple Olympus OM-1 and OM-2 after I came to Canada. I have taken many of slides during my travels, and kept a few hundred of those.

Slides Directory	I have made available some pictures to help my friend Dennis Kaska publish his stories about Cariboo on the BC Adventure site. The following text went with the pictures: Martin Pytela has lived in the Cariboo for several years in the late 1970's and has returned many times since. Martin has grown up in what was then known as Czechoslovakia. His coming to Canada in 1977 had a lot to do with sharing his dreams of artistic and personal freedom with Dennis Kaska, not to mention several years of sharing dormitory rooms and houses. Martin has been a photographer since his early teens and for a while he worked as a free lance photographer. He has worked extensively with black and white process, developing and printing his own work. He has taken thousands of slides over the years and has kept some of them. Ultimately, his career took him into the world of computing and Internet software development. He now lives with his wife and two daughters in Surrey, BC and makes pictures just for the fun of it. The images were taken with Olympus OM-2 SLR 35 mm camera on Kodachrome slides. They were digitized using Minolta QuickScan35 slide scanner and Adobe PhotoShop 3.0. They were colour balanced and compressed to small JPEG files to make them easy to download.
B&W Directory	I decided to post a number of my older black and white pictures I took in Europe. These images were taken with my old Praktica SLR camera on ORWO film. I printed many of them on large size paper when I still had my darkroom set up, and some of them hang in my and my friends' houses. The images on this site were printed by my friend Jan Hynek on a regular commercial colour C-41 process 3.5 by 5 inch paper, and scanned at 150 dpi. I had to reduce the images to 108 dpi to fit on a standard PC monitor. Both Dennis and Jan appear in some of these images.
	Colour Slides	Black and White
	Surrey Contemporary Cariboo Large Size Cariboo Animals Cariboo Moon Cariboo Aspens Cariboo People Cariboo Lakes Cariboo Old Equipment Cariboo Lumber Cariboo Rivers Cariboo Country Cariboo Objects & Sunsets	Austria in Autumn Austria in Winter Czech Railway Scenes Czech Winter Scenes Czech Old Castles Czech Dawn Scenes Germany in Summer Poland Bieszczady Poland Bialowieza Cariboo Country

Photography

Colour Slides

Black and White