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.

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.

12: Mono Photography

After having a series of specific subject using any techniques, today was a specific technique but any subject. I toyed around with the idea of photographing myself on the company's grey gravel parking lot leaning against the wheel of my silver Citroen C1, but today we woke up rather early and decided to have a bowl of cereal before going back to bed. As Ania was finishing up, I headed for the bathroom and noticed the light on our bar and her sitting at the other end. Of course, the classic Cuban bar scene!

At half past five in the morning we were setting up for the shot, Ania using the floral dress as we thought it would show up well and be appropriate for the style, while I took my leather jacket and cap as an old whisky drinker. The camera I positioned to look down the length of the bar, with us far down it, although I had to zoom a bit to ensure there was enough apparent separation between us - but it was that low down on the bar shot combined with the Havana theme that decided the direction and the props.