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.

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.

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.

24: Silly Walks

Freedom with the Hiber Nation!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Today the group really managed to confuse things, I think some of them have spent too much time in the sun. Luckily, my image happened to fit the finally chosen theme.

Religion is here again, and government, both organisations that have massive problems with public nudity and very little concern with violence on the roads and in social situations, especially here in Poland where religion is measured in how many arrive at church each week rather than the quality of belief.

Sleep is a place I can escape from the bigots.

22: AGD (anti-goth descrimination)

Playing the Other Side, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

In our excitement to get on the road we left an area rich in Gothic and entered one where it was almost none existent. Luckily, as we sat waiting for dinner while they dealt with some disaster in the kitchen of our hotel, I spotted this superb silver candelabra. Having a desk to work from, I did some significant editing using Microsoft Paint, including a colour inversion to get the green, which was lucky as the original shot was not at all inspiring.

The message here is that while a total subject may not be what you need, shaving away excess can reveal a number of inner ideas that you had not noticed because the total picture was swamping your ability to analyse. I also composed the following to go with the picture: "Our darker counterpart resides as far away as the other side of our eye, and there are not enough candles in the whole world to illuminate the darker corners of our soul." Here, words are combined with the image, just as the other day I combined a cartoon format, linking concepts so that each helps define your idea.

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.