072: Playing for my baby!

Playing for my baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Music and Sugar

This shot is more important for me than my other, more humorous or naughty ones, the doing of something that makes Ania happy, the continual reaffirming of our love.

I have noticed that many people producing series of what they call self-portraits are really producing self-images. What do I mean? Well, a self image uses only that person as the image, supported by a series of props - objects found or purchased with the intent on producing an image of how that person imagines him or herself.

A self portrait, on the other hand, attempts to show how that person really is, and because the emphasis is less on using props to support this vision of self, the use real objects, real dreams and real people.

Meet up with a bunch of self-imagers and you may make the mistake of believing you have joined a group of single people. meet a group of self-portraiters and you can see who is single and who is in a relationship. Reality, of course is much more complex than this, and there is nothing wrong with either form of production - but it is something worth bearing in mind when you interact with people producing what they call self-portraits.

I can see that my preference is mainly for self-portraiture, and as a consequence I aim to show my life and dreams in my images, even if any one particular image shows a situation I have never directly expereienced.

When I view work by self-imagers I am left wandering what is it that they are leaving out, what is not being shown. These images are often high-craft and popular, but they are also empty of real emotion, perhaps because they are only ghost images of a real person and their life?

068: My Procrastination

My Procrastination, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Procrastination Station

When I procrastinate, I distract myself with my own thoughts, but that is a little less than interesting to watch. I thought about this shot all day, but then eventually I could not put it off any longer and got my camera out...

Did you know that studying can seriously affect your ability to produce art? And this includes discussing your work with other people from the same field. This seems to be partly an effect of distraction by the influence other others work,and the absorption in gaining craft skills at the expense of cutting out your own niche.

It can be beneficial instead to concentrate on the acquisition of raw data and the post-creation analysis of your own work and others. understanding through teaching is often achieved through a process of comparison with 'great' works or traditional methods. The final result is that your view of the world can become restricted, you lack the vision of an empty horizon that the originator of the great work or tradition had.

It seems to be better if you talk about what you see and feel, and limit your examination of the world to what people are doing in other fields. You have to get out of the cage that is peopled by those competitive to you, and talk to people who are not but who have a different view of the world.

067: First Light of Life

First Light of Life, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Flying Feet

Growing is like flying, a long, slow movement towards the sun. This shot is straight out of the camera, taken at dawn with still a lot of blue in the light. It took quite a few attempts to get it right, especially as we were using the timer and had little time to get into position.

Most of my effort went into the planning of the shot, it was Ania's decision to shoot in the morning, and she did almost all the work in making it a reality - all I had to do was lie back on the bed while she repeatedly jumped on me to get in position before the camera timer triggered the shot. There was no flash, the white light is from a halogen room light and the blue is city light reflected off the sky at dawn. Notice how Ania's hands seem to grow over the solid reliability of my feet.

065: Monday Moaners Are Mad!

Monday Moaners Are Mad!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Monday Mugshots

How do you think other people enjoy listening to us moan about the fact that it is Monday? Are we not just being a teensy bit selfish by imposing our lack of thought on our our family, friends and co-workers? Being miserable is often a tool in the hands of those who wish to make headway in business, being miserable in the office to gain sympathy and, as it happens, free information from people around trying to make that person feel better. Don't believe me? You need to observe office dynamics a little closer.

Today, my bunny ears are my two fingers up to those who seek to abuse others in order to aid their own climb of the slippery pole of company success. one day they will have more money, bigger cars, larger houses and more expensive houses - but as much ability to talk seriously about things outside of work as a low-IQ bum.

063: The Essential Guide

The Essential Guide, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The People's Group of Professional Amateurs.

Life is full of problem, often because various elements of society would rather you did not communicate. Husbands and wives are often badly unprepared for married life simply because even talking about how to help your wife fasten her bra is an unmentionable subject. You can often spot the worst culprits in society, they are the ones who talk about 'family values'.

Women often exchange bras several times a day, it is an awkward job that certainly does not become easier as one becomes older. What better daily activity could a couple share than the fastening and unfastening of the bra? You are, of course, only one small move away from a cuddle.

This is another story told through a set of images, although here there are two stories - that in the coloured images and that as the 'guide'.

062: Master Cad

Master Cad, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Priceless Parodies

Every day more people get into trouble with credit, and I bet not many of them think that credit card adverts are funny then. This group was about imitating the humour used in a credit card advert, but I am more concerned about the ease in which many people end up in financial difficulties through too free access to credit. The strain financial problems can place on any relationship is huge, and finding help can be extremely difficult.

Ho ho ho, new, new, new!
Must, must, must, buy, buy, buy!

We have had little in the way of financial problems, largely because we do not value goods over thoughts and are hence quite prepared to do without. It makes a great story, though, and being able to split that story into four images in one whole has great potential for expressing art!

061: Art for your sake

Art for your sake, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Jump for Mikey etc.

Jump? After fifteen years of arthritis the chance of leaving the ground all together is a feat in itself, a real jump is about impossible. But, hey, who said that you have to jump with your legs, that's just plain limbist! However, the truth is that the few practice jumps I did make scared my cat.

The image required a quote, but rather than follow the Craft route and find someone else's, I decided to use the Art approach and devise my own. After all, that is supposed to be the purpose of this exercise! I had an idea about what I wanted to say, but it took some effort to get the same form to fit both - such as using the same verb - in order that both are treated equally, at least from the language point of view.

059: Travels in a Suitcase

Travels in a Suitcase, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Half Dressed Tuesdays

The suitcase exists to help take us on our travels, but for most of the time it simply gathers dust and stores things that we probably do not really need. I like to relive past journeys and plan new ones, and what better companion on these memory and dream trips!

Dreams are something that most of us have, often having the same or very similar ones throughout our lives. Daydreams, though, are an important way of accessing our mind's treasures, but too many people either believe daydreaming is a waste of time, or know not how they can make them a reality.

Oh, and half dressed tuesday? Don't you remember that sixties series "Man in a Suitcase"? Perhaps not :)

058: Me Man

Me Man, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

My Pet Peeves.

Well, with such a challenge, where should one start? To be honest, the most long-running thing I get annoyed about is the way people assume that because they see you as a man/English/white/etc. that you must fit whatever mold they have in their heads. Great, it saves them from thinking, from treating one as a human. Eventually, these classes they assign become more important than the people themselves, and from there it is a short walk to there being blood on the floor.

I just want to be me, not a dog that responds to the commands of the so-called leaders of society without question.

You will find that it is not the classifications of what you are that is important, you are not a set of classes, you are an adhesive body that you can stick classifications to, and change them if need be. Changing these classifications, these labels that one applies to oneself, or allows society to to, can be hard to change, but the process will never get easier unless you practice. That means putting yourself in new situations deliberately, not waiting for life's wiles to force you to change. No matter what you are or what you become, the essential you will remain, holding together with the force of life itself.

056: Raindrops

Raindrops, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Covered Faces

This is the view through my windscreen of our Citroen C1 on a rainy Saturday morning as Ania shops at the nearby market, with a view of a nearby housing block, trees and bushes and a blue car - and a partial view of me in the mirror, of course! I usually shop with her, only today we had a lot of things like laptops in the car, which we did not want to leave unattended. Shopping together is a very important social function, an opportunity to help each other in an environment which is neither the home nor work.

I applied a texture from the GIMP library, and this is the first texture that I have used. I expanded up a small one to the size of the screen to give a kind of raindrop texture.

055: Superwife

Superwife, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Feeling Super.

Your partner has more to offer than you realise, they also have their own personality, something worth paying more attention too. Here Ania has an expression that I never asked for but which she has brought into the image. She is much stronger than she will admit, even to herself, especially in the environment of Poland where the social pressure is to keep saying how unable you are - until you eventually subconsciously believe it.

I wanted to create an image for her to show how much I respect her remarkable skill and power, and how much i am in awe of it. Interestingly enough, some of the composition was not conscious but my practised and acknowledged reliance on automatic input from whatever its source is within my brain.

054: Helping Me To See Clearly

Helping Me To See Clearly, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Peek a Boo

Having a partner helps you to see the world in a different way, and Ania gives me the best vision possible. She is still a bit jet-lagged after flying back from New York to here in Poland on Tuesday, but she was quite happy to participate in today's picture.

I gave this image a border as I was a bit worried that the image itself would look a little washed out when viewed against a white background, but it also helps to make a strong image.

I like to include her in my pictures, as without her it would give a distorted image of me and my life. The question is how often to show her, and the answer is whenever the idea needs her. I don't have props, and I don't use people as props - everything is simply waiting for an opportunity to show off some aspect of itself. The strongest relationships are with those things closest to me, and by going out to seek photo opportunities means creating what may look like a strong image, but one's art or relationship with it is in reality weak.

053: Gin - A Step-By-Step Guide

Gin - A Step-By-Step Guide, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Cocktails!

I did not want this ending up looking like an advert, nor like something from a night out with the lads. Drinking is a process, and I wanted to use a set of five images to try and show the whole process.

One of the problems of using an automatic camera is that it makes its own decisions on colour of the image, so the backgrounds of the two images to the left are different, even though they are the same background - with the green bottle and you get a yellow background, without and it went pink.

052: DeepThreat

DeepThreat, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

reimagining movies

Today I was very tired after driving to the airport to pick up my wife, but i managed to squeeze in a little time for this. it was supposed to be a movie scene, but art is all-inclusive of its parts, and the poster is therefore part of the movie. For the second day running I had problems with camera auto-focus problems, but with different cameras. Strange.

This shot I dedicate to all those people from all walks of life i have dealings with here in Poland who say "it can't be done", who want to either not do it, can't imagine that it can be done, are too afraid to do it, or just don't care. And this is all due to the efforts of the effing wonderful mixture of the not-so holy Roman Catholic church here and the state, whose main interests lie in ensuring that people do not have the courage to complain about the level of service either gives and so maintain a suitably servile attitude..

051: Play With My Tiles, Baby!

Play With My Tiles, Baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

shatter, crash, destroy

I had very little time for this one as I had to go to bed early because the next day I was getting up very early. Real life is an important part of art, it can never be separate from it, art is part of the way we think, and the way we think is related to what we have to done and have done.

I had no time to break anything, and nothing really to hand I could break that had any relevance. However, I could do another form of breaking, breaking me up into the different parts I play in life, and showing them in the mixed-up, shattered way I seem to spend my life. I think it is also like a cry for help for someone to come along and help me sort it out.

050: Who is the fairest of them all?

Who is the fairest of them all?, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Spot the Difference / Diptych

Todays group themes were 'spot the difference' and 'diptych', but instead of the normal one image lacking things that appear in the other I decided to change what appeared in the image.

Two shots was all it took, other than the couple to make sure I was getting everything I needed in shot and that the lighting was OK. The editing was remarkably easy, although I experimented with a new-to-me function on Gimp to blend the images. I can tell by looking at the images which one I did first, so I must have improved :)

I pulled my sweatshirt tight to make it body-hugging, and so created the feminine image, while the shirt seemed to work quite well to produce a masculine image. Working with mirrors is hard, though, especially in the tight space of my hall cluttered with the step ladder I had used to mount my rather low tripod on to get the right height.

048: Temperate Horseface

Temperate Horseface, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Horseface

I had never heard of making your face resemble that of a horse, I assume it is a cultural thing. Anyway, since I used text yesterday as part of the image, I thought I would do something similar today, except this time I chose a proverb for the basis. Out came the bottles again, anybody would think I am an alcoholic judging by the number of times I use them as props.

I tried to use a gap between the water and the drinks bottles and split the text so that it looks like each piece of text goes with separate parts of the image. Bending my head and the long slope down my arm seems to help as well (the slow fall into alcoholism). I even chose the sweatshirt as something horsey colour.

A number of my photos, including this one, does not seem to fit the pattern of masculine-feminine, although the ones that do not seem to fit are intended to contain some humour. This has been an unconscious choice, I think something within me has waited a long time for expression.

047: Flikr to Quit!

Flikr to Quit!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Fake News

Since I work with words, I though I would focus on the text content and write some fake news myself, relevant to the fugger challenge for today. Luckily I had a few minutes at work to hammer out an article, but you may have to look at it in large scale to read it.

In one of the comments to this picture, someone asked if this could be considered a photo or a screenshot, and my answer was that it was a photo with a very large border. In reality there is no difference between a photo and a screenshot, as long as you control the content. How many works of art have been created by stacking books, wrapping buildings or sticking cut out images from newspapers and magazines to form a collage? The question of whether you use a camera or the print screen function of one's computer to put those pixels together is immaterial.

045: My Love for Ania

My Love for Ania, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Catchlights

The sun is setting in the west as I look towards New York, where my wife has to stay for another week to teach a course.

She lets me become what I am, more than I ever was before. She listens to my dreams and my philosophy, letting me do what I have to do, even if that is quite different from the other people who surround us. I love her more than anything else in the world.

Catchlights are where you put reflected lights in the eyes to make them more noticeable, and here they look rather rectangular because they are reflections of the sky over the building opposite. In the same way, I processed the image so that the background has become fuzzy, putting more attention on my face rather than losing it among the kitchen units.

044: Old Magazine

Old Magazine, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Magazine Portraits

What do you see when you look at the model on the front cover of a fashion magazine? Yourself inside? Many people never understand how destructive it is on one's sense of self worth to repeatedly view idealised images, especially if one perceives one's image in the mirror to be far from that of the cover model.

These images are not the ideal, unless you let the contiual parade of such images program your mind to accept them as such. Different societies in different times have valued different things - it is nothing more than social programming.

My Sony camera is dying, and I was too tired to take enough shots to get the view I wanted without the pink lines that mar so many of the images the camera now often produces.

040: Drinking the Sky

Drinking the Sky, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Sky


After a week in Manhattan we escaped for the day to visit Bear Mountain, and since we were taken there by car I still have no clear idea where it is, except somewhere near West Point, presumably on the Hudson River. There were so many photo opportunities, but little time as we did not want to bore our host.

I like the way that the clouds swoop down towards the right, the water bottle kind of following the line. This was not intentional, or at least not intentionally so. However, our brains absorb more information that we are consciously aware of, it mainly feeds us with information that it thinks we believe is important. Getting beyond this internal filter is important if you want to see what is really there rather than our subconscious mind's opinion. Art training often involves a lot of training in this area, but you can teach yourself by taking the time to think about why things are the way they are instead of accepting what other people would like you to believe.

039: Stripey Bottom

US Male, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

US Male.

US Mail meets English male. I played with the colours on me to help create contrast between the two essential parts of this image.

I was more concerned today in introducing Ania to creating photos, and enjoying New York - and enjoying Ania's company, which is the best of all. Our target today was bum, and I have little knowledge of how and where my bum looks best, it looks here as though I need to do some more exploration of this area of me, and perhaps ask Ania for more advice when buying trousers.

038: Kissing at Central Station

Kiss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Kiss.

How many lovers have parted with a kiss at Central Station in New York, i wonder? We were not parting, but the concept seemed important, and i managed to get into view part of one of the almost church-like windows of the upper concourse. Note the scarf, a sign of being outside, travelling, and the cropping of the image was designed to focus on this, an unexpected bonus i found in the image.

We saw few people kiss in the city, so I used this occasion to try in a small way to encourage kissing in New York.

I have always been interested in cartoons, and this is another image where i have experimented with minimising the colour palette. Doing this gives me a chance to work on the problem of what is art and what is craft,what both and what is neither. What is my personal art and what is the highest achievements of all humankind figures somewhere in this.

037: Hotel Peeper

Hotel Peeper, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Peeper.

Funny things happen in hotels, many long corridors and an odd mix of people free of the restrictions they might feel back in their normal environment. I still feel a kind of alien, ghostly quality about hotel corridors, and i wanted to explore this in an image.

Notice how the white light that forms most of me has no form or texture, only an outline, pushing your eyes away, letting them seek other objects to focus on. This use of empty space and strong images affects how our eyes respond, and is the same for writing - it is just a pity that the visual side is such a poorly valued part of writing courses.

036: Pee'er

Pee'er, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Water

Ah, well, if there was no direct humour, it just would not be me. One of the few school report comments i can still remember was from a maths teacher - "Trevor gets on with his work with occasional flashes of brilliance - and humour!".

Words are what I deal in during my working hours, and I am fascinated by hour sounds and spelling relate. This combination of image and words was just too great to resist, and although it might look silly i thought it was important that anyone trying to understand what i am saying also realises this part of my thinking.

Although simple, it did take a moment to select the right position to stand in relation to the images, and the best position for the camera. luckily the sun was in a good position, so there were no awkward shadows to deal with.

035: Belly Button

Belly Shot, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Belly Shot.

Typical view of New York, or is it something else? Actually, this is the Flikr Group Roulette belly button shot, but I have concealed the real purpose of the picture.

First day in a new city and a new country, and you realise you do not know what the locals consider to be acceptable behaviour. So we were a little shy in setting up this shot.

The Art Deco buildings dominate the background, Ania's arm and hand the foreground - but follow her finger like a secret sign and you will discover the surprise!

034: It's In The Mouth

Farewell Kiss, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today we jetted off to New York from here in Poland for a week. Hugo the ginger cat is a mischief, you never know what he will be doing or where he will be in thirty seconds time. "That was then, this is now," is his motto.

The symmetry in the original image was too good an opportunity to miss, but I partially concealed this by offsetting the image. Like using the things one finds around oneself as props, one should also use the potential one finds in the image - it is your image and your art after all.