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.

17: Failed Photographers Club

Failed Photographers1, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Yesterday I had to reproduce an accident, today it was the work of a failed photographer. After much thinking around for ideas, I came up with this one. But how should I make it the work of a failed photographer while still being a good example of my own work?

I find that it can help not to try and control too many variables, and to be flexible to new ideas as the process, well, proceeds. For example, the shot of me fully dressed turned out to be out of focus, but rather than retake it I decided the focus - out-of-focus contrast between image elements added to the failure effect - as did the bedding in the background I would normally cropped off or otherwise made disappear.

I am tempted to reshoot the out-of-focus element, but I know that doing so would be a statement of craft rather than art, or the achievement of a different kind of art, depending on how I handle it.

15: Scrunched Up Faces

I wanted to try another composition, and after some conceptualising I ended up with this triptych. The interesting thing is that people really like my humorous images, but I also want to express my serious side too as I feel it needs a lot of development even at the age of 45. One interesting side theme is psoriasis, something that I live with more successfully in terms of acceptance than most people with it. Doctors criticise that I do not look after it well enough, but on the other hand they do almost nothing to help people accpet it, perpetuating the background whine of 'conceal it, hide it', which does nothing to help find a cure. Instead it keeps a market going for temporary cures, a way of making us pay financially for what we have as our skin.

In terms of generating ideas, this multi-theming (psoriasis / new-groups / finding-me / humour / etc) helps in generating ideas, on any day I have a number of sources I can draw upon, non of which existed at that moment I decided to pursue this project. When we get involved in a project it is easy to run at it and assume that we already know enough at the beginning of the project, but it is much better to develop these themes as a way of solving the inevitable 'writer's block'.

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.