053 - Rock Chick

053 - Rock Chick, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This is Ania's favourite jacket at the moment, so I decided to use a picture of her in it to make her a new screen image for her computer at work.

I still want to investigate more people's fears and feelings about dressing in ways that surprise. If I had told you that I had the great luck to run into some noteable rock star from the 1980's. and she allowed me to take this picture of her in some cool cafe I happened to be hanging out in, then the classes in your mind would probably have said 'lucky guy!' where4as if I said that I had run into some politician who usually dressed conservatively, you kight have said 'well, well!'. However, if I said that this was your mum or someone else you expect to be common, grandmother material as found on any street, you might be feeling some resentment, shock.

Whatever your actual feelings, the chances are you have seen the reactions I describe here many times over, there are even special words and phrases to describe women over about 50 who 'dress young' without being famous, including but not exclusively 'mutton dressed as lamb'. In society, the cost of being an individual is ridicule or complete rejection. How mature is it to make someone else unhappy because you cannot accept them when they have had to spend their life learning to accept you and your values? How intelligent is it to attack the only people who bring colour and depth into our world, if these people left today the conformists would have nothing new again, ever. No new music, no new videos, no new books, no new humour, no new fashion, no new electronics, nothing, but endless repeats of what has been seen a thousand times before.

Life would be a dead soap.

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.

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez

042 - Band in the Hotel Polonez, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Continuing our fun pretense at being in a band, here we are giving an impromptu performance in the hall of a three star hotel in Poznan, Poland, a city which despite its pretensions within Poland as a city of international fairs, still achieves a mere 'where?' when we mention it to most people outside of Poland.

Still, he there we were, on a voluntary 5-day trip we had organised to the city in order to learn a bit more about the other side of Poland and do some shopping.

Of interest is perhaps the fact that most of what I am wearing was purchased from shops or departments dealing in women's clothes because men's clothes are BORING!!!!

The only question left in my mind is whether Lublin is ready for a balding, greying man to wear these trousers on its streets? Are our grand nieces ready?