Cost vs Equipment vs Opportunity

EDGY06 zuk, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The Żuk is a van made in Lublin, the city where I live, and this early version probably dates from the 1960s. I have a fond spot for these and have even had a website devoted to them, and this early type is so rare now that over the past decade I have only found five examples. As you can imagine, that does limit their photographic opportunities.
I often see people on photo website talking about their equipment, which I and many other people cannot afford either in time, storage space or cash, so does this limit our potential as photographers? One answer is to expand our photographic range by taking advantage of image editing software, which can be downloaded for free if we cannot afford the marketed equivalents. The problem here is that there is a marked coldness on the side of some 'equipment' people because we are not catching the image in the camera. This is an old question, and one with no resolution to some people.
More interesting is the opportunity question - what if there is no time to deploy all the equipment necessary? The amount of time I have had to photograph the five Żuks was between 15 seconds and 5 minutes, which is not a lot of time to deploy an array of equipment especially since the meetings were unplanned. I was simply lucky that each time I had some form of camera, often just a compact and only once my SLR. One shot was taken in the street as the van passed, the image above was made over a fence in someone's field.
With such fleeting contacts woefully short of equipment and access, how could I have arranged the above image? If I were a painter, would it be bad if I made a quick sketch and then made the 'proper' painting later in my studio? Paintings of fleeting events cannot possibly be completed during the event, so why do people apply such restrictions to photography?
The idea for this image occurred some two and a half years after I took the photograph, and I have no idea how I could arrange access to an equivalent van. The answer could be to choose a different van, but the intended use of the image required this early type of Żuk. For me to create a fresh image I need a good idea, and here the coincidence of idea and access time were a long way apart.
Let us assume instead, that I am able to organise an opportunity to create this image as a photograph. By preparing myself to take the photograph, I am influencing the photograph. The very act of preparing means I have already made some of the decisions: I am no longer going to respond to the situation but instead take control of the situation.
Control is artifice, and whether we control the players in the image or the pixels on the screen, it is all artifice. One type of event has no better intrinsic quality than the other.
Ultimately we only sense the world through our bodily organs, the best we can do for ourselves is to be interested in the quality of what we choose to sense rather than trying to establish if equipment X is better than equipment Y. If you can apply X better than Y, use X - but if you can apply Y better than X, use Y.

EDGY Poland - the concept

EDGY05 car, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We have a new long term project to produce a new book about Poland, based on a set of images we are going to take. Having spent years editing websites and books about Poland written in Poland by Poles, we feel it is time that Poland had a chance of being what it could be. We are going to reject the old 'can't do, won't do' attitude, and show the Poland that 'they' prefer to remain hidden - that Poland can be FUN.

Bye bye stodgy tradition!
Bye bye lonely images of objects without humanity!
Bye bye monument counts pretending to be tourist guides!
Bye bye histories ending in 1945!
Bye bye 'the people are grateful for the beneficent government'!

An Hello Fun!

This is going to be a Poland of which my Polish wife can be proud.

Most of all, we want to turn our city of Lublin from the city of the dead into the city of the living - so no more grateful acknowledgments to small men in big hats, no more having to be serious, and no more 'if you do that you won't be Polish'. History is history, but this is our world now.

056 - AI is for Avoiding the Issue

056 - AI is for Avoiding the Issue, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Marches and rallies are exciting things to do, but what is the point if people in your own community are still scared to say what they need to say? The problem is that the community is full of real people with real problems, while abstract people conveniently do not actually exist.

People often pretend that the abstract problems are more important because they are 'what God wants.' However, what God wants is for people to care about the local things first. That, though, is an unpopular view, but it would be.

055 - What Men (are told to) Want

055 - What Men (are told to) Want, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

The suit - the uniform for those not in the military.

Wear a suit enough and one day you will discover that you have forgotten what it is to wear something different. Ever seen those sad individuals with three button tee shirts, socks with sandals, socks with shorts, or, perhaps worst of all, the man on the beach wearing a short sleeve shirt obviously designed to be worn in the office.

The suit - one more nail in man's coffin of confidence.

The suit, like any uniform, is a way of showing that you belong to a group; however, it is also a means of defence. Any external means of defence used over a long period time erodes the mind's or the body's ability to defend itself, even drinking coffee to boost awareness soon replaces the body's natural equivalent. Carry a gun in public to defend yourself and evenetually you will fear to go out without one - even if a gun is one of the quickest ways to escalate a bad situation and another way to avoid learning other effective eans of defence that support the mind and body.

A family vacation for the long-term suit user can be a confusing affair, and an easy way of embarrasing one's own offspring. A short-sleeved shirt is many suit wearers limit of variation from the mean - the suit. A short sleeved shirt is not beach wear, it's not cool and, most importantly, it marks you from a distance as someone with narrow views on the world.

053 - Rock Chick

053 - Rock Chick, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania's favourite jacket at the moment, so I decided to use a picture of her in it to make her a new screen image for her computer at work.

I still want to investigate more people's fears and feelings about dressing in ways that surprise. If I had told you that I had the great luck to run into some noteable rock star from the 1980's. and she allowed me to take this picture of her in some cool cafe I happened to be hanging out in, then the classes in your mind would probably have said 'lucky guy!' where4as if I said that I had run into some politician who usually dressed conservatively, you kight have said 'well, well!'. However, if I said that this was your mum or someone else you expect to be common, grandmother material as found on any street, you might be feeling some resentment, shock.

Whatever your actual feelings, the chances are you have seen the reactions I describe here many times over, there are even special words and phrases to describe women over about 50 who 'dress young' without being famous, including but not exclusively 'mutton dressed as lamb'. In society, the cost of being an individual is ridicule or complete rejection. How mature is it to make someone else unhappy because you cannot accept them when they have had to spend their life learning to accept you and your values? How intelligent is it to attack the only people who bring colour and depth into our world, if these people left today the conformists would have nothing new again, ever. No new music, no new videos, no new books, no new humour, no new fashion, no new electronics, nothing, but endless repeats of what has been seen a thousand times before.

Life would be a dead soap.

052 - NO is for National-ist Education

052 - NO is for National-ist Education, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There is so much to do, and so few people prepared to do anything, which makes me wonder why.

Here in Poland we have friends who, like us, one partner is Polish and the other from some other nation. Either you live apart each in your native countries or together with one having to live in a foreign country.

Such is the price of love.

However, as a foreigner here you have no rights over any children you may have - they have to be put into some international school or force fed Polish culture in a social and education system that cares more about reinforcing Polishness, and force feeding the Polish view of the world than in creating understanding of the knowledge learnt.

Such is the price of love.

Humanity? Love? Respect? Understanding? If your nation sings the national anthem at school, flies the national flag at school and you do nothing then you are part of the process of allowing hate through differences to continue.

Free education of its national chains!

Say NO to Church and State in schools!

092 - Red

092 - Red, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

After attempting to encapsulate various ideas into pictures, here is one I took for fun for Flikr Group Roulette. The theme was 'red mania', and since those red trousers had already done stirling service this weekend, out they came again. Or down they came again.

As a bonus, because my wife is away on business in New York, I was able to send her the link to my photostream so she could enjoy what I have been up to this weekend.

Note the boots, they were hard to find here in Poland, but they are fun.

091 - Moptown Classic

091 - Moptown, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I didn't notice today's Flikr Group Roulette task until I had already finished my other pictures, but I decided to get dressed up again and, with my theory that given infinite choice anything can appear to be adapted to any other use. The task was to take picture with a mop and bucket, as an aisle cleaning whore, so here is mop-rock!

Who said work can't be beautiful!

My wife has lost a lot of weight this year, and that has meant we have spent a lot of tie buying new clothes for her, only to have her grow too small for them. However, it has also been a lot of fun, and I have had the opportunity to show her why I am so dissatisfied with the narrow choice available to men. Our confidence in what we can wear and what we like to wear has grown, and our understanding of each others needs and desires have grown too.

In this picture my hat, scarf, shirt, tee-shirt and trousers all come from women's clothes shops, which has meant some fun as I try out clothes in their changing rooms. Here in Poland the choice of men's clothes is worse than it is in western Europe or the States. Walking out in this kind of gear gets me some strange looks, the other day a young couple in a shop couldn't do their shopping for looking at me, which was rather nice for an arthritic codger who's gone grey early like me.

What is annoying, though, is that if we were some well known rockers, no one would think it odd for us to dress like this, they would actually expect it, so why can't society in general accept middle aged people of no stage experience to dress like this?

048 - Rocker Grainy

048 - Rocker Grainy, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

If I was a rock star I could walk down the street in the clothes I want to wear and no one would mind.

Sometimes I consider buying a guitar to sling over my shoulder so that in their eyes I become a rock god they merely don't recognise.

Society - it's killing me in stages.

People often ask me where I get my ideas from, and the answer is through taking action. My wife was reading about a Polish woman who went to visit her American friends, who owned a beautiful apartment in Rome, right in the centre. She said to her hosts "I have always dreamed of having such an apartment here, in Rome." They replied "So why didn't you do it?"

I often say "If you don't do anything, nothing will happen, but if you do do something, something may happen." What this means is that I have ideas for photos because I don't just think about having ideas about photos, I take photos. But more than this, I don't just take photos, I select things, arrange them, take the picture, and then play with the picture. Every time you take an action, something happens, often more than you are aware of. Some of things you knew would happen, some of the things you thought would happen don't - but also, something always happens that you didn't expect. The more actions you take, the more chance you have of happening on the unexpected.

Take this picture: I saw that the blue LED of my phone's battery chager made a blow glow on my wardrobe door, and when I stood in front of it I could see my outline. Cool, I thought, took off my clothes and photographed th resulting shadow image. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, and because of the low light the resulting image was rather grainy.

Then I decided to take a picture of myself as a punk rocker, which I did, and then played around with that image, made it black and white and rubbed away the part of the image showing a flag motif on my tee shirt in color from the original image I had beneath it. Great, and then I realized that as a kind of 1970s rock image, the blue shadow image would go rather well with this one - so I added it as a new layer.

This was an unexpected idea, and a complex one as there was a lot of black on the shadow image while the punk rocker photo had a white background. Using a tool on my image manipulation software that allows me to delete specific colors I began to remove the shades of greyish/reddish black one by one.

Suddenly, out of the blue, as it were, I had this image, 'Rocker Grainy'. Well, I had to crop it down until it just showed my lower face, neck and shoulder.

That's what I mean about actions always result in unexpected things, this image exists because I was doing something else and this just popped out of the process.

046 - B is for Bad to be Human

046 - B is for Bad to be Human, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

During our visit to Poznan I finally realized why the shops we didn't want to enter used shop window dummies without legs, while we were much more inclined to use dummies with legs.

At first we just assumed the non-leggers wanted to sell to a clentele with aspirations, but why would aspirers prefer legless models?

Eventually it came clear that the legless represented a dehumnised aspiration, that aspiring to a class as opposed to be aspiring to be a kind of human. Weird idea? Not really, you won't have to go far to find people who value your life less than their status. OK, it is a simplifaction, what explanation isn't. Sadly, sitting in a local church yesterday, I was seriously lonely, the priests had achieved a congregation unable to enter into dialogue with others, we were a mere class of people, not human to the priests. Contrast that with a visit to another church where, as strangers, we were helped to a pew, given books to help us join in, and spoken to by the congregation and priest afterwards.

Education spends too much of its time teaching through naming classes and then assigning those classes values. This is an important thing to teach, but you also need to teach with as much vigour that these classes are simplifications for our understanding, that the class is not real, but what it attempts to classify is. This gives a duality of vision - the class in question, and the broadest, loosest class we can imagine. I might be described as being middle class, but I fit better the wider class of human or even a living being. You might be reading this on a computer screen, but it is part of a much wider class of information presentation objects, of the larger class of human constructed objects, of the much wider class of brief coming together of atoms that probably won't matter one way or another twenty trillion years - but does now.

many churches teach that sex is bad because somewhere in its history it was worried about holding society together in the face of irresponsibility, disease and other social ills. But because sex was perceived as a problem, it came to be seen as bad. And if sex is bad,l the body must be bad. And if the body is bad, Man as a species is bad. And if man is bad, why care about the individual?

I suspect God loves the good athiest better than the average church-goer, because God cares more about humans than a class called 'Church'.

045 - Band in Print

045 - Band in Print, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was more of an experiment in technique, playing around with the perspective of images so that they appear to lie in the planes of things visible in another image.

However, it also shows some development in our series of band photographs - with its new name 'Band', and doing things with the concept other than creating band images. Not sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but it is a good demonstration of the principle of 'if you do something new, something else new comes out of it that you did not expect.

I think that what we often admire in people who achieve something is not what they set out to achieve, but something unexpected that happened as a result of their effort to do something new.

090 - nOT dEAD yET

090 - nOT dEAD yET, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I really am concerned about the slow decline into death, partly because after getting arthritus in my thirties and learning how difficult it can be to simply move around when you are old, it set me to wondering what we are all doing here.

The older I get the more I become aware of people doing things because they believe that their age demands it of them. Why? Women chop their hair shorter and shorter as they get older because, they say, it makes them look younger. No, young women chop their hair short to make them look older - more to the point of women cutting their hair shorter is to help with hot flushes.

Most men always have a problem with clothes, and as they get older and less likely to go into the kind of store that offers something of interest, the more like a unifiorm their t-shirt+jeans or suit becomes.

I might look like a silly old fool to some people, but that is because too many silly old men wear the uniform of their age, and I am more of a surprise because I do not conform. Why should I conform here, I am not at work.

More importantly, my wife does not want an old fogey on her arm, she choses fun over conformaity.

044 - Cafe Meeting

044 - Cafe Meeting, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I watch people when they receive calls, even by landline, and I watch to see who remembers that they have chosen to be with someone physically and those who forget, those who can say no and those who don't, and those that are simply too involved in what they are doing to remember to think about why they are doing it.

What kind of person are you?

This combines two images, each one taken from the two largest malls in Poznan. I only took the overlay one because of the tiype of lights hanging from the ceiling, of a shape I and many other people really like although seemingly impossible to buy in Poland if you do not work for some large design company. We first saw them in Orsay in a delicate pink.

Here they almost form tattoos on Ania's arms.

043 - C is for Concrete for all Ages

043 - C is for Concrete for all Ages, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania in Poznan, questioning why concrete should be the foil for the youth and very old in photographs, can't we all contrast with it?

The concrete in question is part of the base for a huge war memorial in Poznan, built by the communist authorities in that inhuman stylised way that they used to pretend concern that never touched them.

Ania was born in communist Poland and had to grow up with the propoganda, so another contrast of this picture is the ugly balanced by a mind that survived the propoganda.

Interestingly enough, the ever-lasting flame has gone out, but the ever-lasting youth has taken overt the monument as skateboard park.

Ania is also wearing a top she bought from Orsay, which after we had tried it on in the changing rooms there we run into a friend and former employer who had also been on the same diet as Ania. She seemed quite surprised to see us choosing this very bustier top, but I said I was quite happy with it, and why didn't she consider something similar. As we left the shop she was examining the rack in question, but I suspect that she will remain in cream blouses for, well for a long time.

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Continuing our fun pretense at being in a band, here we are giving an impromptu performance in the hall of a three star hotel in Poznan, Poland, a city which despite its pretensions within Poland as a city of international fairs, still achieves a mere 'where?' when we mention it to most people outside of Poland.

Still, he there we were, on a voluntary 5-day trip we had organised to the city in order to learn a bit more about the other side of Poland and do some shopping.

Of interest is perhaps the fact that most of what I am wearing was purchased from shops or departments dealing in women's clothes because men's clothes are BORING!!!!

The only question left in my mind is whether Lublin is ready for a balding, greying man to wear these trousers on its streets? Are our grand nieces ready?

089-picture me

089-picture me, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

As indicated by the number of the tltle, this one was done for the fuggers group of the day - recreating a painting. We chose Adam and Eve by Tamara Lempicka, a copy of which by a local artist hangs above our bed, the latter pushed out of the way for this shot.

Of course, our recreation has a few changes - my arthritus did not allow me to bend enough, and Ania is not ready to allow her students to see too much as most of them are from places east of Poland and often from cultures too steeped in sexless, human-less traditional Christian upbringings, the basis of the former Soviet states.

The apple is somethign that Ania eats every day, she has always loved them and is quite happy they are part of the diet she has been on for the past six months to lose weight. As part of this diet is an hour's exercise three times a week, something that has done wonders for her circulation, a great boon for a frequent flyer and train taker.

041 - Skin Deep Vision

041 - Skin Deep Vision, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Living in Poland it has been interesting listening to the reaction of Poles who have gone to work in my native England. Poland has managed to convince itself that it is one nation, so what happens when comfortable middle-class well-educated people we know arrive in multi-cultural England? Often good, sadly too often 'I am not racist, but black people should stay in Africa'. Sometimes I feel I have reversed into 1950's Britain, and now I must go through the pain once more of racism, sexism, and deep and pointless nationalism.

I used to live in Birmingham, a city with a high proportion of people who could trace their roots back to the Indian subcontinent, but to me just people. What is annoying is being told by Poles returning from there that it is alright for me, I was born in the UK. Sorry, I was born in a small village surrounded completely by 'white English' people, I never saw anyone of another race until the arrival in my class at school of a girl from Jamaica. Luckily, we had had no pictures of the queen, no national flag on the wall, and no national songs to learn, so she just slotted in just fine with me, just another girl.

Am I white, am I red, or am I some kind of red and white panda? Does it matter, because under the skin my basic value is human.

038 - C is for Complacent

038 - C is for Complacent, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I see many problems with the managements of companies, and this is one of my least favourites - where managers rush around politicking with each other but ignoring basic issues of communication within and between departments. Guess who gets the blame when things don't go right? Guess who is called lazy?

It can be fun being a manager, getting tasks set by those above them, attending meetings, putting together reports - but what about the procedures that are already in place or none existent?

I have worked for companies that create new products as part of their basic existence and also service companies. The latter tend to apply product thinking to their own systems rather than solving issues in novel and applicable ways. I think this is the result of the education and experience of the management team. By product thinking I mean sending managers on management or product-related courses, or buying in ready-made computer solution or other systems. having spent a lot of time talking to people in management in service industries I can see that they believe they understand innovation, but assume that innovation really means 'new'. a new course, a new system - all pre-made by someone else.

The problem is that many in-house systems are very specific to the nature of the business and the geographical relationship of branches and clients, and the assignations of duties between departments. Innovation is finding a solution that fits by examining the problem, and accepting that you do not know what the answer is before you begin. Not what package you can buy to solve the problem, but understanding what the problem is. This is where it gets tricky, because understanding the problem means abandoning traditional thought, leaving yourself naked to the universe - and naked to your staff as you attempt to learn what it is that they actually do. Yep, you have to admit that you have no idea what the solution is. You don't know. And that is hard in a world of service company management politics.

Hence, rather than learn how to deal with the unknown, whole management teams play internal politics and waste vast resources on systems that mysteriously do not work as well as it said on the package.

Play, play, play, like me in the left hand image, having fun while unnoticed on the table in front of you your internals systems are a mess. that mess sets up friction, and eventually one of your cards catch fire. Run, run, run around with your ass/card on fire, look for someone to blame - and still not see that the processes are still a mess.

036 - E is for the End of Creation

036 - E is for the End of Creation, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There are two ways of looking at life - from the small bits up or the big bit down. Imagine that you defined a car as being a three-box sedan - engine part, passenger part and trunk. If you made a car without a separate trunk, a fastback or hatchback say, then this would not be a true car but a derivative of a car, not a true car. This is the small-bits-up view of life - define a single element as the ideal and then anything that does not match must be some other element.

The big bits down would say that a car is something that is self-powered and primarily carries small numbers of people around - three-box, two-box, truck and the rest would all be 'car'.

Many people consider language to have an ideal model, and anything slightly different is dialect, emotional speaking, corruption and the rest, not true language. This is small-bit thinking. The problem with small-bit thinking is that it excludes original thought, although many would argue that excluding the attendant change is a good thing.

Polish linguistics is caught in a small-bit thinking trap, where many of the practitioners vehemently reject ideas from outside Poland under the very weak argument that "Polish is different'. Polish is not that different, but the result of this thinking is millions of wasted pupil-teaching hours every year in the teaching of language in Poland while at universities the lecturers and professors every day walk past opportunity of greater and deeper understanding, instead enmeshing the next generation in the same trap.

The same thinking traps millions of people around the world into narrow worlds where you cannot even be adventurous in the home you live in without heavy criticism - the question of whether your home is a good design or suits the environment is secondary as to the question of how well your home matches the three-box-sedan model of a house. You must have lots of tiny rooms to ensure that your family spends time apart, houses must be separate from the garden, and vast quantities of rarely used items must fill in the space. The rooms must be featureless boxes that you have to fill with decor and furniture merely to take away the mind-numbing boredom of it all - rather than designing spaces to fit us.

To me a car is a loose concept to describe a whole bucket full of personal transport concepts that has no hope of being filled completely. I am a big-bit thinker - I see humanity first and try to ensure that life and the world is a happy place by meeting our needs.

033 - T is for Trust

033 - T is for Trust, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I believe that trust is one of the many keys to life as we know it. For many long years I never could decide whether God existed or not, but eventually I came to understand that it is not a matter of belief but trust.

From where I am sitting I could hit half a dozen believers with a stone, should I be so careless to toss one, but I would be hard put to find one who would trust God enough to argue the toss with him and still come out with both of you winning.

Whatever form your God or god takes, trust him or her enough that they are there to help you find you, rather than a causer of trouble when things go wrong or bonuses when things go right.

032-E is for Experience Trap

032-E is for Experience Trap, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

We know people who have had summer cottages for decades, and it seems to us that rather than just being a benefit, they have twice as much cleaning to do and they spend a significant amount of time travelling to and fro almost every weekend during the summer.

We all have balconies, but they only use theirs for drying the washing, while we have an awning, a small herb garden and a place to eat, read and generally relax. It also means that we have total access to all our facilities, unlike in a summer cottage.

So, is it better to have a summer cottage or to choose a house or apartment location in the city that gives a relaxing dual purpose life?

Interestingly enough, when I first moved to Poland over a decade ago when I expressed the idea of living in a village or small town outside the city I was given some very odd looks; they thought I was crazy - you had to live in the city if you worked there. When the company I worked for changed locations to the other side of the city, everyone was worried how I was going to get there, and this is a small city of 400,000, where the bus ride would now take me a whole 30 minutes instead of 15!

However, now that more people are buying cars and getting some experience with travel they are beginning to take on board the idea that you can build a house just outside the city to live in and commute in. The next step is for people to build/buy houses in established villages and towns to live there, especially since so many Poles have recently been working for extended periods in the UK and Ireland and can see how many more living choices there are. Nowadays I get less strange looks and more wistful ones!

031-R is for Responsibility

031-R is for Responsibility, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

All countries have their problems, just as all people have theirs, but what happens when you meet someone who always blames someone else for their troubles?

This year sees the 20th anniversary of Poland leaving behind it's Communist era, and perhaps it is time for a change, to turn its back on a whole sum of other problems of the past and try to create a better future for its citizens.

Some people say that a nation recreates itself every decade, and since 1989 we have had two periods - the intital struggle to transform a socialist system into a functional democratic one, and then a decade of expansion of the demcratic system. Companies, for example, transformed from State owned enterprises in the early 1990s, have spent the past decade expanding, remodelling their management process and often making remarkable amounts of money. Middle class people have absorbed this windfall and outfitted themselves with new clothes, cars, vacations, educations for their children and the like, much as one would expect.

What has not changed are the basic attitudes and life at the bottom of the pile. One would not expect rapid change in either area, but perhaps their time has come. However, we are still at the stage where the middleclasses still tell the world and themselves that they are poor - as they drive their high spec cars home from their comfortable job to their new high spec home in the new suburbs and recently absorbed villages of their city.

Smug in their comfort, they allow the nation to be ruled by the mini-dictators, also known as priests, professors, lawyers, doctors and politicians. These people look to the West for their model of a comfortable life, and then to the East for the service they give, smugly boasting of the high Christianity of their nation while at the same time attempting to ensure that the people who could make a difference remain in ignorance of their power.

Poland does not need pity, financial help, it needs some plain speaking from the international community.

030-Depression: someone else's problem

030-Depression: someone else's problem, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Depression is not something that is particularly visible in someone until it is far advanced, and the trip there can be jagged with intermittent highs and lows.

I often wonder how many people end up there simply because most people never learn the importance of taking notice of all the people around them, it's just to easy to become wrapped up in one's own life. Worse, though, are those people who are focussed on their success, who pay attention to the handsome, the beautiful, the people and things that will advance them at work or sociually. These people are always full of excuses - they are too busy, they are too shy, they didn't realize.

In the working environment I am always working to integrate the lonely and the ignored into the team until hopefully they feel confident enough to make their own way.

Me? I am allowed to free fall by most. and as a consequence the workplace for me is mainly a very lonely place, but if I can save someone else some pain, then I have no choice, I must help that person.

Depression is hard to deal with, but it doesn't get better if you ignore it in yourself or in others. Make someone's day today, say hello to someone today, tomorrow and the day after who is unlikely to ever have an impact on your career!

If you want to know one way to view this image, try to take in everything at once while at the same time understand that none of it has any meaning and what you are doing is essentially pointless, but the very action of trying to absorb it all leaves you fully absorbed. What do all those pictures on the wall contain? Our brains have the capacity to contain a functional memory of each and all of them, but when they are all presented at equal depth, none take presedence - your brain has no way of making choices. In the end even the people end up at the same level, at the present with the past. You have probably been here before, and how many times more must you return?

029-Love is Living

029-Love is Living, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is a conjunction of some song comparing love as a fact to another fact of nine million bicycles in Beijing, with the table-culture of Poland - and elsewhere.

It's Easter, say, and the family come together and spend the whole day sitting around a table, eating non-stop throughout the day, ignoring the children in a huge adult-fest that at some point includes some discussion on why some family members currently sitting around a different table in someone else's house or flat are failing to bring up their children properly. You know the kind of thing. The problem I can see is that the children present are not being brought up particularly well either - they are bored, desperate for attention and not being encouraged to discover their own thing. They are being trained by boredom into eventually taking part in the same custom in the future.

Why won't they play with the children, why is it only I that can make paper aeroplanes, take them for walks, teach them how to step from sawn log to sawn log, or be invited to inspect theit toys or drawings.

Because I notice them. Because I respect them. Because I have not become a boring fart adult who desires only gossip, porking, look-what-I-own and aren't-I-hard-done-by.

Love is not saying 'i love you' or simply being there, you have to move and hold them, follow them, take them by the hand, and notice them when things are going wrong. I asked Ania when she last hugged her sister, and she couldn't remember, whereas I could.

Love survives in contact, and since we are always moving, contact is a changing action.

028-Wearing your bank account

028-Wearing your bank account, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Ania is currently attending a slimming club, which partly involves sitting on a fitness bike for an hour several times a week, along with a number of other people. What is interesting is that many of these people are more financially well off than we are, and they are boasting that they will soon be able to get clothes out of the attic that they have not worn in over a decade, since the last time that they fitted.

Proud of keeping clothes for a decade? How many clothes were they buying that so much did not get worn enough that they were worth storing? How good would one look in fashion a decade old? Is this really a bonus? Ania and I regularly get rid of clothes as they become worn, buying enough to wear and not too many that we cannot dispose of them to charity at a suitable stage of wear. Our parents and grandparents kept clothes for much longer, but pride in storage?

One might drag in that over used excuse here in Poland, and blame it on the shortages of the 1980s, but that was twenty years ago and we are talking about educated people, often very well educated people. Where did the programming in their heads come from, what is keeping it going?

Interestingly enough, these same people say that when they cook for their family they have to have something of everything. But these people are on a diet and proud of their ability to keep things for a decade in a wardrobe in their attic, how can you be proud of not wearing clothes that don't fit and wasting wardrobe room when you cannot do the task that is before you - stay on a diet. What about being proud of not eating what you should not be eating?

Here in Poland there is a lot of very expensive, rubbish quality, designer label clothing - which you can purchase from what the local middle classes believe are exclusive boutiques. You have a job which pays well - forget any stories about Poles being poor, by the way, the middle classes are rolling in cash, propery and cars - and so you spend a significant portion on clothes which only look good to other locals, buy more and then store the excess in a wardrobe. Poland, like anywhere, has a lot of good design talent, little of which seems to leak out into the stores, but the middle classes lap it up and then strut around like they were something special. do you remember the story of the king's new clothes, this is a bit like that, where people are duped into parting for cash for no quality.

The oohs, the aahs, when one of them arrives in a shawl, mocassin style shoes, black concealer trousers and bum-covering jecket or coat and a hairstyle that grandma had back in the 1940s, cut to the length that has been deemed suitable for one's age.

When women are young, they cut their hair short to make them look older and more worldly, and buy clothes for work more typical of a forty-year-old who has lost whatever grip they once had on style. The clothing is often cheap, replicas of the mature styles. Later, asa they grow older, they can buy more expensive versions, and they wear them more often, until eventually they wear them most of the time, desperately hanging onto something that they never really had. Men are not immune, the suit eventually producing someone who believes that shorts and short-sleeved shirts are acceptable beachwear.

Style, on the other hand, is something that has to be worked at, but once you allow other things to dominate in your life, the confidence for style just all too easily slips away. Ania has been working hard over the past couple of years to learn confidence in style, and as a consequence is breaking free of the clothing tradition. the clothes she wears do not cost much, and the greatest variation she has is with the smallest items - having more scarves than coats takes less room and less money than the oh so common more coats than scarves we see so often.

Any fool can spend their money on clothes, buying fashion and fashionable cuts and colours, while spending the right money on clothes that suit one's figure, colouring and needs takes nothing but the commitment to continue making conscious decisions throughout one's life.

027-Ones Nation

027-Ones Nation, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Stop.

Your god is calling.

Look

Leaders teach division.

Listen

To your humanity

I get tired of listening to people in governments, education and religion teaching division, we're the best. I will always support a good cause, but please leave me the freedom to figure out what a good cause is based on my humanity and not somebody else's wants.

022-The Development Process 1

022-The Development Process 1, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was just supposed to be used to make a larger image, but it came out strikingly enough to be worthy of its own existence. The top part is very much like many adverts I have seen in magazines over the years.

I attempted to separate the graphical from the more picturesque elements, to put two very much different ways of expressing the same graph background.

I use these little cars, which are rubbery and cheap from my local branch of Tesco (a grocery supermarket change in Europe), to express more complex issues at work as I see many projects fail to meet their full potential because the team members are selected by department rather than by their ability to manage different parts of the project process.

The green car on the left is open top, and symbolises the go-anywhere, open mind needed when change is required. At the other end of the scale is the truck, the result of the development process, the vehicle that actually earns the money. In between are two closed cars, each driven fast with little thought beyond the destination - results now and solution implemented tomorrow.

I need to do a little more work on this image, but I am so busy with work related stuff that it will have to wait.

085-Revenge

085-Revenge, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I am not really into revenge, life is generally far too short for such grief. Mind you, if one were going to do it, one ought to take it very seriously, and I think this is a cold enough method. Yes, nothing like a little cold steel. And the head comes free.

I like the idea of mixing text and hand-drawn images with photographs, just as I like assembling one picture from a number. I really have do not see 'doing everything in the camera' as anything more than a pleasant option - just on option. Creating this image 'in-camera' would have been a little tricky seeing that I lack a whopping great axe and lacked enough time and resources to mock one up - assuming that I would want to do such a thing. The contrast between the photographed part and the hand-drawn part and the text is interesting in itself.

084-Resolved for more than a year

084-Resolved for more than a year, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

To me, one day follows another, if I do not have the resolve to make changes during the year, why should it make any difference at the beginning of a new one?

I am resolved to keep on loving my wife, and to continue to search for new ways of doing things, to give society a better chance for a greater future by empowering those who could make a difference if only they knew how - and to break the power of the callous and the selfish.

083-New year, new band

083-New year, new band, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Having had no success in locating a copy of any version of Guitar Hero for the PC, we decided to create our own band.

Where would we be without the aluminium-vase-and-Hoover-tube guitar or, come to that, the chrome brush handle. Seriously, though, when the weather warms up we plan on taking this band on tour, photographing it in many different situations!

Anyway, here's to the New Year, and me kissing my microphone with those raucous tones.

Another festive death in Poland

Another festive death in Poland
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is the hill side Catholic cemetery in the samll town of Wawelnice, in eastern Poland. These grave lamps appear in bulk at most major religious festivals, particulalry Christmas, Easter and All Saints/Souls. They get bigger every year, especially with the increasing use of plastic in the lamp construction.

To see a hill side cemetery lit up at night is remarkable, and there are many such cemeteries here as hills are otherwise unusable for agricultural purposes.

082-Last Cold Farewell

082-Last Cold Farewell, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

A farewell at an important junction of life.

This is a barely used narrow gauge railway line here in Eastern Poland, in the small, delightful, poor and untouched town of Wawelnica. There is a significant sanctuary in the town, but the significant money it generates goes safely into the pockets of the Church, leaving the town to molder.

081-Ode to Bread

081-Ode to Bread, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Tonight we are having bruschetta - with prosecco!

Oh joy!

Oh joy!

Oh joy!

And it is still in the middle of winter

080-Seeing Red

080-Seeing Red, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

080-Seeing Red

Would you believe that I took this through the door of a washing machine, the camera in the machine, with a crumpled piece of red plastic sheet stuck across the front. Why did I do it? Can't really remember, but it was an experience I probably will not be repeating on the floor of my bathroom in the near future.

I had to make a special layer for the vignetting thing, and I will keep it in case it comes in useful another time in case I forget how to do it.

079-Childhood Dream

079-Childhood Dream, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is one of many model cars left to me by my grandparents, who bought them in the late 1960s and, to my delight, had them on display behind glass in their living room.

I used to have one just like this too, but it never survived me growing up. These days I take better care of my toys, and this and several others are on display behind glass in my DVD/satelite cabinet - thanks to a very loving wife ;)

078-Up Against the Wall

078-Up Against the Wall, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today the task was to show 'legs up against a wall', which most people seemed to be interpreting as meaning lying with one's bum near one's wall, with legs leaning up against the wall. I felt that the wording allowed a much wider scope, and here is the result.

There always seems to be a lot to do in the kitchen at this time of the year, and then there is all that preparation needed for all those parties one just has to go to. Anyway, here we are, pressed 'up against the wall' trying to get everything done on time.

Note that we actually bought the stockings especially, and they are too small for Ania as here in Lublin people with Ania's shape are not supposed to be interested in such wear, apparently, just as you are not supposed to have breasts larger than C-cup or possibly D-cup, according to what the shops stock.

077-No Ghetto

077-No Ghetto, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today's group was set up by an English couple who emigrated to Australia, and then decided they did not want to lose their 'Englishness' - and decided to take pictures of themselves drinking tea in different places.

This desire to retain one's nationality-ness is the worst thing imagineable to me - it reduces you to an icon, you are no longer a real person. As an icon you are prime target material for those people who create stereotypes, making life hell for anyone who just wants to get on with their life in a country different from the one they were born in. I mean, if you want to retain your nationality-ness, why bother moving elsewhere?

Having lived in my present country for eleven years, people still cannot accept me as being a valid member of the community - any discussion about anything important and you notice that people start associating you with your 'nationality', and the real 'you' no longer exists. So, everyone around you can complain about the state of the nation, you cannot - wot the fuck? I am married to a national of this country, so either I get treated as an icon here, or she gets treated as an icon of this nation there.

So, our view is - drink your tea because you enjoy it, but don't do it to maintain your nationality-ness because you are just reinforcing the difficulties of other, innocent people.

076-All I have for Christmas

076-All I have for Christmas, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Back, for one week only, taking advantage of the time I have off for Christmas. Actually, I thought it would be interesting to try out some of the ideas I have been developing in my other main blog, Life by Design, to see if it would make any difference to the pictures i took.

I did take more pictures with me partly clad than I have recently, but for each challenge I did make more effort to show problems or issues related with the subject, resulting in some interesting pictures. I also aimed for contrast between the apparent images and the text that went with them.

Right, and now about today's picture.

Living in a different country from where I was born, I am tired of being told I should either follow the local tradition or abide by my 'native' tradition? Why on earth would I want to make an icon of myself for one or the other of the societies I live in? Can I not simply represent myself, my family or my community before my God?

Today, Christmas day, I can escape from national and religious so-called 'tradition', and instead get on with continuing and creating our own traditions, surrounded by people who see me as a person and not a representative.