12: Mono Photography

After having a series of specific subject using any techniques, today was a specific technique but any subject. I toyed around with the idea of photographing myself on the company's grey gravel parking lot leaning against the wheel of my silver Citroen C1, but today we woke up rather early and decided to have a bowl of cereal before going back to bed. As Ania was finishing up, I headed for the bathroom and noticed the light on our bar and her sitting at the other end. Of course, the classic Cuban bar scene!

At half past five in the morning we were setting up for the shot, Ania using the floral dress as we thought it would show up well and be appropriate for the style, while I took my leather jacket and cap as an old whisky drinker. The camera I positioned to look down the length of the bar, with us far down it, although I had to zoom a bit to ensure there was enough apparent separation between us - but it was that low down on the bar shot combined with the Havana theme that decided the direction and the props.

9: Immortality

How do you show your vision of immortality in the form of an image with no more than about 24 hours in which to create one's concept - including time to sleep, work, shop and actually produce the effect? After discarding a number of small ideas I rather jumped in with possibly the most well known attempt at immortality - Egyptian pharoahs. What appealed is the opportunity to dress up and take an outdoor shot - well, a balcony shot. I thought the early morning sky combined with flash would give me the closest I could come to the right light. I was able to take advantage of my psoriasis skin condition, as one would not expect to survive 4000 years without some deterioration.

The next step was to question what would happen if one survived - and the answer would be a media blitz. I decided to give the concept a twist here and produce a newspaper article (using Word with final edits in Microsoft Paint and in Gimp), as this would give me a large photo format and the unreality of one of those newspapers that are not above producing fake news. Best of all was the opportunity to create a terribly hammy set of front page headlines with no comeback from the language fascists.

8: Hot or Not

Today's target was not to be Hot, but to be Not. and this was harder to plan than expected because we do put in a lot of effort to conform to societies norms, which makes being convincingly outside those norms quite difficult. I chose this cafe toilet in a basement of one of the market square buildings in Zamosc, originally owned by Armenian merchants. Here I am, facing the mirror, with the camera balanced on the toilet seat.

Somehow, although being out and about for most of the day, I still ended up with an interior shot, perhaps I am not yet ready to explore the outside world. Perhaps inspiration is best when fitted to the environment you operate in rather than when we put ourselves in a foreign one. Our subconscious evaluates mostly our current environment, perhaps learning how to get more from our current environment is better than dreaming of 'writing that novel once I live X life'.

6: What Mood Are You In?

I really need to get out and go somewhere, shuttling between work and home is no life if you are looking for inspiration. It is also a struggle trying to do the simplest things with a program you are as yet unsure about, such as Gimp, which would not let me draw a simple circle.

I started with a green background with just the facial parts, but then decided to dump the green and go for this cartoony image, reminiscent of the kind of drawings I have seen made by inmates of prisoner of war camps.

5: Scary Doll Whores

Today's problem was what to do when you do not have access to the required prop, a doll in this case. I decided to approach the issue by not showing a doll, but another stage of the process that must be part of eventually meeting a 'scary doll whore'. To achieve this I knocked up a fake communicator interface with a controller of the right age to be interested in dolls. To help everything fit, I chose to wear a cap on backwards to help narrow my face as well as to increase the silliness of my expression - one of fear of the task I was being asked to do.

I spent about 40 minutes building the mock interface, 2 minutes taking the pictures and another 60 minutes post-processing the images, partly because the contrast between my face and the screen was so way off. In the end I divided the image into three layers: everything outside the screen, the screen and the image of 'Weronika'. Because the image of Weronika was so poor, I imported the original image of her into this picture.

4: The Kissing Project

This one was complex to process, having to cut and paste images, and I did not have enough time to do anything about the colour balance between images. The top right image is also out of focus, again that lack of time to achieve that professional finish - but is that really important? If you could achieve a professional finish given the right equipment and time, but lack one or both of them, is it not better to invest the available time in the basic concept behind the image?

Like yesterday, it is a four shot collage, but this time in a balanced square format to try and give it the feeling of a cartoon that the images suggest. If I have the time I would like to take a copy, shrink it down to a quarter area and paste that in place of the the emptier top-left image, and then do the same with that image.

2: Colors Not Found In Nature

Well, if the first image had been a worry, the second more so - how was I ever to match the level of my first entry? Luckily, while having dinner with the family, I had rolled up my yellow napkin and it occurred to me that I could place it behind my glasses to produce a funny eye to entertain everyone for a moment, and give a niece the opportunity to use her new, 'professional' as she described it, camera. Yellow and white were not normal eye colours, I reasoned, at least not in this intensity.

The hardest part of using this technique for a self portrait is the fact you can barely see what you are doing, although it did give me the idea that a small mirror behind the camera could be useful in that I would be able to see if I was actually getting the shot I was after. Several shots were wasted with my head not being visible at all, but eventually I got this one. Only minor trimming of the image was required, which was lucky as I had another appointment soon after.

I was also concerned that my psoriasis would be visible, but I reasoned that since I had joined a self-portrait group, sometime my skin problem was going to become visible to other members: I could not hide behind doors forever. Only a little of the psoriasis was visible, good enough I though for an introductory image.

1: Sunday Under Glass

My first attempt in years to compose a picture, rather than to frame what was already there. This is one of the small window panels of my bathroom door, and I used Gimp to edit some of the dark wood colour to this vaguely dawn-like pinky-red since my hand appears as a sunburst. The sunburst symbolism is apt in that this was my first submission as a fugger, and as a typical art-deco design feature matches the door in style.

Today's group was about photographing something under glass, and my initial intention was a head shot in my bathroom mirror. I selected a hat and a scarf to help achieve the effect I had in mind - and then noticed the possibility the door windows gave as I was entering the bathroom, camera already in hand. It took about three shots to get this effect, I spent more time relearning how to set the timer on the camera and waiting while it failed to respond than actually getting the shots. However, all the time was invaluable as it allowed me to develop my hand position.

Gimp, as an image editor one can download for free off the internet, still remains an unknown land for me, having spent a decade doing pixel-level edits using a program only a little better than Microsoft Paint. Gimp is full of features that I had only heard of before, with many menu items that I could only guess the meaning off. However, no matter how complex the program, once you figure out how to load an image and then save it again, does it matter what proportion of the available tools you can use in between? Taking an interesting picture, putting a copy in a separate directory and using that is all you need to do, because no matter what the options you try out on the image do, you can always safely discard the changes. For this image I played around with a couple of tools, failed to achieve anything other than a largely black image, but then it gave me the idea of changing the wood colour. I had been trying to sharpen the image, to be honest, as the window frame was out of focus on the left hand side, but in end changing the colour of some of the wood colours became so striking that the out of focus problem went, one could say, out of focus. If you look, you can still see the blurriness of the frame.

As the first attempt I had been concerned whether I could actually produce a presentable image, being aware of how my skills and equipment were lacking - my five-year-old Sony Cybershot has a tiny lens and a lens cover that often fails to open without some jiggling, and has rolled out some 5000 photographs. In this situation one becomes aware of the professional level equipment some of the other group members would be toting, their experience, talent and training. It was a little overwhelming, but nevertheless I had some confidence in the originality of the idea - but at the end of the day it is the originality of the idea that is most important, the rest comes down to skill though practice. After viewing all the images uploaded by other members of the group, I became aware that while the quality of many of their images was high, many were so poorly conceived that I did not get beyond viewing their thumbnails.