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.

052 - NO is for National-ist Education

052 - NO is for National-ist Education, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

There is so much to do, and so few people prepared to do anything, which makes me wonder why.

Here in Poland we have friends who, like us, one partner is Polish and the other from some other nation. Either you live apart each in your native countries or together with one having to live in a foreign country.

Such is the price of love.

However, as a foreigner here you have no rights over any children you may have - they have to be put into some international school or force fed Polish culture in a social and education system that cares more about reinforcing Polishness, and force feeding the Polish view of the world than in creating understanding of the knowledge learnt.

Such is the price of love.

Humanity? Love? Respect? Understanding? If your nation sings the national anthem at school, flies the national flag at school and you do nothing then you are part of the process of allowing hate through differences to continue.

Free education of its national chains!

Say NO to Church and State in schools!

092 - Red

092 - Red, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

After attempting to encapsulate various ideas into pictures, here is one I took for fun for Flikr Group Roulette. The theme was 'red mania', and since those red trousers had already done stirling service this weekend, out they came again. Or down they came again.

As a bonus, because my wife is away on business in New York, I was able to send her the link to my photostream so she could enjoy what I have been up to this weekend.

Note the boots, they were hard to find here in Poland, but they are fun.

091 - Moptown Classic

091 - Moptown, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

I didn't notice today's Flikr Group Roulette task until I had already finished my other pictures, but I decided to get dressed up again and, with my theory that given infinite choice anything can appear to be adapted to any other use. The task was to take picture with a mop and bucket, as an aisle cleaning whore, so here is mop-rock!

Who said work can't be beautiful!

My wife has lost a lot of weight this year, and that has meant we have spent a lot of tie buying new clothes for her, only to have her grow too small for them. However, it has also been a lot of fun, and I have had the opportunity to show her why I am so dissatisfied with the narrow choice available to men. Our confidence in what we can wear and what we like to wear has grown, and our understanding of each others needs and desires have grown too.

In this picture my hat, scarf, shirt, tee-shirt and trousers all come from women's clothes shops, which has meant some fun as I try out clothes in their changing rooms. Here in Poland the choice of men's clothes is worse than it is in western Europe or the States. Walking out in this kind of gear gets me some strange looks, the other day a young couple in a shop couldn't do their shopping for looking at me, which was rather nice for an arthritic codger who's gone grey early like me.

What is annoying, though, is that if we were some well known rockers, no one would think it odd for us to dress like this, they would actually expect it, so why can't society in general accept middle aged people of no stage experience to dress like this?

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.

046 - B is for Bad to be Human

046 - B is for Bad to be Human, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

During our visit to Poznan I finally realized why the shops we didn't want to enter used shop window dummies without legs, while we were much more inclined to use dummies with legs.

At first we just assumed the non-leggers wanted to sell to a clentele with aspirations, but why would aspirers prefer legless models?

Eventually it came clear that the legless represented a dehumnised aspiration, that aspiring to a class as opposed to be aspiring to be a kind of human. Weird idea? Not really, you won't have to go far to find people who value your life less than their status. OK, it is a simplifaction, what explanation isn't. Sadly, sitting in a local church yesterday, I was seriously lonely, the priests had achieved a congregation unable to enter into dialogue with others, we were a mere class of people, not human to the priests. Contrast that with a visit to another church where, as strangers, we were helped to a pew, given books to help us join in, and spoken to by the congregation and priest afterwards.

Education spends too much of its time teaching through naming classes and then assigning those classes values. This is an important thing to teach, but you also need to teach with as much vigour that these classes are simplifications for our understanding, that the class is not real, but what it attempts to classify is. This gives a duality of vision - the class in question, and the broadest, loosest class we can imagine. I might be described as being middle class, but I fit better the wider class of human or even a living being. You might be reading this on a computer screen, but it is part of a much wider class of information presentation objects, of the larger class of human constructed objects, of the much wider class of brief coming together of atoms that probably won't matter one way or another twenty trillion years - but does now.

many churches teach that sex is bad because somewhere in its history it was worried about holding society together in the face of irresponsibility, disease and other social ills. But because sex was perceived as a problem, it came to be seen as bad. And if sex is bad,l the body must be bad. And if the body is bad, Man as a species is bad. And if man is bad, why care about the individual?

I suspect God loves the good athiest better than the average church-goer, because God cares more about humans than a class called 'Church'.

045 - Band in Print

045 - Band in Print, originally uploaded by gingerpig2000.

This was more of an experiment in technique, playing around with the perspective of images so that they appear to lie in the planes of things visible in another image.

However, it also shows some development in our series of band photographs - with its new name 'Band', and doing things with the concept other than creating band images. Not sure where it will lead, if anywhere, but it is a good demonstration of the principle of 'if you do something new, something else new comes out of it that you did not expect.

I think that what we often admire in people who achieve something is not what they set out to achieve, but something unexpected that happened as a result of their effort to do something new.