1: Sunday Under Glass

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

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

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

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