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.