033: What Dreams May Come

Digital Well, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I was looking for an opportunity to play with the GIMP photoediting software, but perhaps the day before we fly to New York was not the best choice. Especially since my wife wanted some complex editng of her image as well. I gave the lion's share of my edit time to my wife, as I feel it is more important to encourage others than to indulge oneself, their responses give much better feedback than one's own.

Today I explained to my wife my concept that the first step to art is to understand oneself in one's work: if you cannot find yourself in your work, you are copying someone else's far too much or you have yet to discover yourself - whichever it is it will not help you to develop your own art. If you think about it, if an unmarked piece of art is discovered, experts can deduce who is likely to have painted it by recognising that artist's hand in the work.

Once you understand yourself well enough, you are ready for the next step - that of understanding how you relate to everything around you.

032: Make it Funk

Funkin Down That Groove, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Funk? Been on nodding terms with it a long time ago in the past, but how to create me in the image of Funk? Inspiration hit in the bathroom, as it often does as you cut yourself off from all the activities you are involved in and can concentrate on your worries and planning. Or, at least, that is how it is for me. I had had some thought of mocking up a trumpet, but then, sitting there, I saw one of my wife's perfume bottles, and it almost resembled the mouthpiece of a trumpet.

From that point on it was a downhill slide as the the rest of the props fell into place: a jacket from Kazakhstan, presented to my wife by her students, and her new pair of sunglasses; one of my hats and a piece of tube that had been lying around as part of a door mechanism. Colour was thanks to an accident on Gimp, the nightclub style lights were a straight photograph of one of our halogen room lights.

The result is nothing quite like I have done before, which is pleasing, as is the fact that it both resembles funk and somethiong else at the same time.

031: And the Winner is...

Everyone Loves a Winer!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today I decided to hide the Fugger challenge very loosely behind an apparent typo, or perhaps an apparent mistaken subject choice. The real image is buried deep in the picture, with me visibly celebrating a success.

The main aim was to get the bottles and glasses in focus, leave enough room to write at the bottom, and hide myself just off centre and out of focus in the background. Once more, I attempted looking at the whole winning process, and then choosing an image that belongs in the set but which has a slight twist.

030: Freestyle Walking

Being Prepared Everytime, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There seemed to be lots of images concentrating on the walking itself, or jumping from buildings or benches, but nothing much on the related activities. Here I demonstrate some potential methods for storing essential materials.

Innovation might sound sexy, but it often involves the most prosaic of activities, but by the very application of original thought to anything, it kind of lifts it to a new or fresh level. The result may be easy to copy and quickly become commonplace, but you will always know that it was you who stood at the beginning of the process, giving your though to the world.

029-Unusual Photographs

Life's a Scream!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Another subject-free day on FGR, it just had to be unusual - but how do you know when you have produced an unusual image? I mean, it might be unusual to you in your terms, but to someone else it might be commonplace.

I having been playing around with the two-teaspoon trick for years to entertain any number of children, but today I decided it was time to take it out, dust it down, and see where we can take it. My wife even let me use her lipstick.

I took around twenty shots to get this one, and only managed to achieve a small part of the potential of the teaspoons, some of the other shots were quite remarkable in the expression they show. You can move the teaspoons to many different positions to give slanted eyes or to have the teaspoons either lying alongside your head or with the handles sticking out sideways.

Again, everything I used today were just typical items one can find around the home.

24: Silly Walks

Freedom with the Hiber Nation!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today the group really managed to confuse things, I think some of them have spent too much time in the sun. Luckily, my image happened to fit the finally chosen theme.

Religion is here again, and government, both organisations that have massive problems with public nudity and very little concern with violence on the roads and in social situations, especially here in Poland where religion is measured in how many arrive at church each week rather than the quality of belief.

Sleep is a place I can escape from the bigots.

24: 80s Style Double Exposure Portraits

Bible College Question, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

College Yearbooks are not a feature of my culture, and one's from the 1980s are almost a foriegn language. Religion seems to have crept into this weeks imagery, one I am sure will annoy some because they will not give me the right to have my own relationship with my god.

So, here I am pretending to be a bible college student, but if you look carefully at the black areas you will see a very much different image. Sadly, too much evil is concealed within religion, because religions generally ensure that you have little to do with how the are run and what actually goes on beyond your temple.

I am very pleased with the meaningful aspect of this image, accidentally created while concentrating on creating a fun image.

23: Human Bodies as Words

A word from your god, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

A few words from your god...

The last day of the long weekend, and today I managed to get a shot that only required minor editing. Here the letter is a V, as an "A VEe", or 'ave'.

Living in Poland and you cannot help notice that the churches look different - but the one I can see from my window at work has a replica, circa 1938, English Gothic tower in concrete. This tower had until fairly recently the word 'AVE" near the top on each side. I simply used the idea of "AVE" in the sky and the idea of a god, looking down from heaven, with the burning fire of Hell just behind one shoulder.

22: AGD (anti-goth descrimination)

Playing the Other Side, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

In our excitement to get on the road we left an area rich in Gothic and entered one where it was almost none existent. Luckily, as we sat waiting for dinner while they dealt with some disaster in the kitchen of our hotel, I spotted this superb silver candelabra. Having a desk to work from, I did some significant editing using Microsoft Paint, including a colour inversion to get the green, which was lucky as the original shot was not at all inspiring.

The message here is that while a total subject may not be what you need, shaving away excess can reveal a number of inner ideas that you had not noticed because the total picture was swamping your ability to analyse. I also composed the following to go with the picture: "Our darker counterpart resides as far away as the other side of our eye, and there are not enough candles in the whole world to illuminate the darker corners of our soul." Here, words are combined with the image, just as the other day I combined a cartoon format, linking concepts so that each helps define your idea.

21: Bad and Nasty Shoes

Winding Road, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is me lying on the ground in a small park-ette off the central square in the small old town of Opartow. This would have been better if I could have cropped the image and perhaps rotated the image by a few degrees.

The tree was ideal and I made several different shots with it, the bark an ideal foil for a number of ideas. This is one of the most important methods of idea creation, finding something that inspires you and allows you to find different ways of interacting with it. It is worth spending the time playing around and experimenting because something in the subject is interacting with something deep within your head.

20: Mobile

Handrise, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Taking a picture with a mobile phone was the theme, and only took a bit of fiddly work to both hold my hand and phone in the relevant positions. What I failed completely to do was to get the image off the phone and onto the computer - in the end I had to bluetooth the picture to my wife's phone (which has a bigger, more high resolution screen) and then take a photo of the camera. Compounding the difficulty was the fact that we were just heading off on a long weekend break and I had to do the edit with the only graphics program on my wife's laptop - Microsoft Paint.

Not the best image, but it is the second in a series of using the hand to represent the sun and its rays in a kind of Art Deco style. This theme needs some work, and my hand needs suitable exercise to get all the fingers equally positioned.

19: Tribute To

Kaptain Kobold, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today we had to choose someone in the group who had inspired us, so I chose 'Kaptain Kobold' as his work was similar in some ways to my interests and he also encouraged me by comenting on my images.

I had to select one of his images and re-shoot it. I enjoyed the opportunity to hand draw the background and the boxes, as it gives photography more flexibility when you can actually draw in your own content. On the flip side, it is a lot more work to design the strip and then to take all the pictures and then render them down to a useful format.

18: High Key Society

Plenty of Harm, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I realized today that although I have been playing harmonica for over two years, I had no photo of me playing. Since I needed some image I could do a 'high-key' edit on, I thought 'what better chance', grabbed my leather jacket, dark glasses and pretended to blow some tunes. In terms of mass appeal I think this idea has been used to often, but I really did this one for myself. One should not be afraid of doing things for oneself, you have to live with yourself, not just with the people who surround you.

In summary, this picture is for me, in counterpoint to the images for other people.

17: Failed Photographers Club

Failed Photographers1, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Yesterday I had to reproduce an accident, today it was the work of a failed photographer. After much thinking around for ideas, I came up with this one. But how should I make it the work of a failed photographer while still being a good example of my own work?

I find that it can help not to try and control too many variables, and to be flexible to new ideas as the process, well, proceeds. For example, the shot of me fully dressed turned out to be out of focus, but rather than retake it I decided the focus - out-of-focus contrast between image elements added to the failure effect - as did the bedding in the background I would normally cropped off or otherwise made disappear.

I am tempted to reshoot the out-of-focus element, but I know that doing so would be a statement of craft rather than art, or the achievement of a different kind of art, depending on how I handle it.

16: Beautiful Mistakes

Swing Your Camera, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today's task was to produce a mistake, as if you were about to press the shutter and something changed the image to create a different kind of beauty. Fine if it happens, but how do you achieve accidentality within any particular 24 hour period?

Thinking about the camera, I realised that using the timer could help as you are less certain about when the shutter will operate, so if you play around in front of the camera you might eventually create a suitable image. Secondly, I remembered a group I found on Flikr that was about creating shots by throwing one's camera in the air.

Finally, I just held the camera in my hand, pointed it in roughly the right direction and pressed the shutter. I had to do this a few times in different locations before I came up with this one.

Other people used my suggested timer and throw techniques, which in a way puts an element of my art in their images, as it is my thought that directed them to produce their images. I think this area of idea creation needs further investigation.

15: Scrunched Up Faces

I wanted to try another composition, and after some conceptualising I ended up with this triptych. The interesting thing is that people really like my humorous images, but I also want to express my serious side too as I feel it needs a lot of development even at the age of 45. One interesting side theme is psoriasis, something that I live with more successfully in terms of acceptance than most people with it. Doctors criticise that I do not look after it well enough, but on the other hand they do almost nothing to help people accpet it, perpetuating the background whine of 'conceal it, hide it', which does nothing to help find a cure. Instead it keeps a market going for temporary cures, a way of making us pay financially for what we have as our skin.

In terms of generating ideas, this multi-theming (psoriasis / new-groups / finding-me / humour / etc) helps in generating ideas, on any day I have a number of sources I can draw upon, non of which existed at that moment I decided to pursue this project. When we get involved in a project it is easy to run at it and assume that we already know enough at the beginning of the project, but it is much better to develop these themes as a way of solving the inevitable 'writer's block'.

14: !Flikr Notes

This image really shows up my lack of good lighting equipment, I have to rely on my normal apartment lighting and the flash. The task, though, was to create an image that people could attach notes to, and there was a suggestion that one could show the contents of one's wardrobe. There was also the restriction that I wanted to include something from yesterday's picture.

Rather than doing the obvious shot of content with me beside it as the owner, I wanted to ensure that I became a part of the picture. Too many of the pictures I hate are 'me standing in front of this building', 'me standing in front of...", so 'me standing in front of wardrobe' was obviously out, but 'me being part of the wardrobe process' in an uncomfortable way that reflects the problems of sharing wardrobe space with someone else having far more clothes, now that expresses something worthwhile.

The result also encompasses a common theme of many marriages I know where the wife treats the husband as a mere money-making, picture-hanging driving machine, otherwise an inconvenience who needs to be tidied away while they get on with having a life.

13: Guilty Secrets

This one was simple to set up, and the idea grew out of the concept that it would be interesting to take something from one image and show it in the next, here the brandy glass appears in yesterday's image.

Guilt though, is hard to define as it means what we expect from society and what we personally desire are not the same things. Do we need this acceptance of two levels in order to survive by defining something that is ours and not simply doing what society has already defined for us? Perhaps we are not machines, and the laws we define are nothing more than an expression of our need to rebel or laziness in solving problems at source.

I decided to fool the guilt in people by mixing masochism with the worship of feet - a successful mix as it turned out. I was also pleased in how effective it was, partly because it was a difficult pose to hold for both of us - Ania had cramp in her toes while I was on my knees with my neck cranned hard up against the cupboard behind me.