072: Playing for my baby!

Playing for my baby!, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Music and Sugar

This shot is more important for me than my other, more humorous or naughty ones, the doing of something that makes Ania happy, the continual reaffirming of our love.

I have noticed that many people producing series of what they call self-portraits are really producing self-images. What do I mean? Well, a self image uses only that person as the image, supported by a series of props - objects found or purchased with the intent on producing an image of how that person imagines him or herself.

A self portrait, on the other hand, attempts to show how that person really is, and because the emphasis is less on using props to support this vision of self, the use real objects, real dreams and real people.

Meet up with a bunch of self-imagers and you may make the mistake of believing you have joined a group of single people. meet a group of self-portraiters and you can see who is single and who is in a relationship. Reality, of course is much more complex than this, and there is nothing wrong with either form of production - but it is something worth bearing in mind when you interact with people producing what they call self-portraits.

I can see that my preference is mainly for self-portraiture, and as a consequence I aim to show my life and dreams in my images, even if any one particular image shows a situation I have never directly expereienced.

When I view work by self-imagers I am left wandering what is it that they are leaving out, what is not being shown. These images are often high-craft and popular, but they are also empty of real emotion, perhaps because they are only ghost images of a real person and their life?

045: My Love for Ania

My Love for Ania, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

Catchlights

The sun is setting in the west as I look towards New York, where my wife has to stay for another week to teach a course.

She lets me become what I am, more than I ever was before. She listens to my dreams and my philosophy, letting me do what I have to do, even if that is quite different from the other people who surround us. I love her more than anything else in the world.

Catchlights are where you put reflected lights in the eyes to make them more noticeable, and here they look rather rectangular because they are reflections of the sky over the building opposite. In the same way, I processed the image so that the background has become fuzzy, putting more attention on my face rather than losing it among the kitchen units.

4: The Kissing Project

This one was complex to process, having to cut and paste images, and I did not have enough time to do anything about the colour balance between images. The top right image is also out of focus, again that lack of time to achieve that professional finish - but is that really important? If you could achieve a professional finish given the right equipment and time, but lack one or both of them, is it not better to invest the available time in the basic concept behind the image?

Like yesterday, it is a four shot collage, but this time in a balanced square format to try and give it the feeling of a cartoon that the images suggest. If I have the time I would like to take a copy, shrink it down to a quarter area and paste that in place of the the emptier top-left image, and then do the same with that image.