145 - Terror - Who Pays

145 - Terror - Who Pays
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

People think it is acceptable to put fear into others who are innocent, it is the simplest way of trying to achieve a gaol. I mean, you could pay to advertise, but they would rather use fear on the innocent.

Anyway, I drew this one from scratch, which made a nice change, and I incorporated things in it which I thought people would understand, as well as things which I understand.

I have been using this wipe technique for so many pictures it has become the method, nothing else comes close to expressing what I want to say. I mean here I could have just left it the original boxy graphics, the equivalent of a normal photo in my eye, but I want to put more life into it by blurring things that are not important and giving movement to those that are.

I see a lot of highly skilled Photoshop operators who can produce highly realistic imagery of fantastic scenes. You can imagine here how someone else might blend a man with a building, with an aircraft coming in to crash, all highly realistic like a cinema film. But would it offer any more than added realism?

144 - Ania in Three

144 - Ania in Three
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I have really got behind in my blogging, just too much work going on - plus there has been plenty of action on the multiplayer internet game I play.

This is a triptych, actually three seperate images, that I have been working on for home display initially. I wanted bol, bright, a combination of techniques past and present, and not something I was trying to copy from other people's work - although the influence of previous contact, concious or not, is obvious.

This is Ania and this is part of the city that has been built while she has been living - 1970s in the background and the naughties in the foreground. Two different eras.

I could have arrange the image differently so that the crop cut different on Ania's head, but I don't want that purity of separation - body/legs/feet. Getting that purity in life is often the sign of something artificial, either in the physical world or the way we perceive the physical.

For example, Communism did not start promptly in 1945 and finish in 1989 - things from the near and distant past hang on either in the real world because it is impractical to remake everything overnight, and in people's thinking. So, most people live in housing from another political era, some still desire to escape back there, some are still trying to escape it. Nothing is fully translucent.

143 - Happy Mad Dog

143 - Happy Mad Dog
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Not quite sure what this is supposed to be, but it was on the balcony of the family in the opposite block. Still working on this medium, but I think my previous cigar shot worked better as I treated the main subject and the background separately. I might try the same treatment here to get a bit more contrast between subject and background.

I* have no idea why they left it on their balcony for about a week, perhaps because to the child it was equivalent in size to a small pony.

142 - Trevor and the Amazing Cigar

142 - Trevor and the Amazing Cigar
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

We are not smokers, but we are open to new experiences. We bought a couple of cigars, which was an experience in itself, and then smoked them in our hotel room in Krakow with its view over the nearby monastery gardens.

The original was taken by Ania, and the colours were nothing special, neither was the background, but that was not a problem. Smearing the colours in a circular pattern was rather like the emblem background I did a few days ago, except that this time I used 100% wipe to demolish the background inconsistencies and to arrive at a swirling smoke vortex thingy effect.

141 - Face - Mask

141 - Face - Mask
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I came across this image while doing some edits, so I cropped this out and blew it up to a reasonable size before creating this mask-like effect.

We all wear a mask, and almost always it is an imperfect one and we are often unaware of how imperfect it is. As the yars pass, the mask becomes increasingly unyielding until we become molded to the mask rather than the mask molded to us.

As an editor I have long been fascinated by how many people fail to understand that a critique has to have some method of scaling comments. It is easy to say that something is good or bad - but this is meaningless unless one adds how good or bad, to give some kind of context. One might say that a piece of work is better than another, or focus on some aspect and explain why it appears good or bad.

140 - Ania in Pink Shoes

140 - Ania in Pink Shoes
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This was an experiment to make something of a poorly lit and hence heavily contrasted shot. I think I got a lot of the way there, but there are still a few things to fix. I might even remove the background completely and work something from there.

The pink shoes were nice, but we did not buy them, but we did buy the dress. It was while we were on vacation in Krakow and, as you can see, I was in the fitting room with Ania. Other men wait outside for their partners, waiting to give an opinion which may or may not be taken kindly. Other men stay safely out of the shop, waiting on their own or with other men in a similar situation, each trying to avoid the other's gaze. Some men avoid the issue almost entirely be ensuring they do not shop with their wives - almost, because they must have some opinion, positive, about the clothes bought.

139 - C1 Dash

139 - C1 Dash
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Working with car pictures always reminds me of that part of my life when I was an engineer and spending a lot of time working on vehicles of various types. Well, that kind of thing must leave an imprint.

I would like to help bridge that gap in society where if you are interested in cars then you must be some kind of autohead. Excluding people by grouping them is very common, as is people excluding themselves by the same process. The chances are if you have this then you have a car, and your life certainly relies on a huge number of vehicles, even if only to bring you fruit from the fields to your market of choice.

So, why exclude people because they have an interest?

One of the evils of people in society is an attempt to discourage others or exclude them because they are interested in a subject beyond one's own.

I love the fact that as humans we can create such objects, design them in ways we all can relate to even if we choose that relationship to be one of alienation.

138 - Dreaming of Cinque Ports

138 - Dreaming of Cinque Ports
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

The Cinque Ports are well described on Wikipedia, but basically they were five ports from about the 13th century that gave England a bit of a navy when required. It still exists in an honory kind of way, and forms a little part of the background of life in the county I grew up in. This is from a visit several years ago, I think it is part of a gate.

I have made the background watery and a little difficult to focus on, rather like the past. The past is a place we cannot visit, and here is the seal on the gate preventing our access.

137 - Ania and Magda

137 - Ania and Magda
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This was taken in a dim pub without using flash, and you will not be surprised to hear that the result was an almost totally black image.

Given that I said some time ago I only really need composition and consistent lighting, this was too much of a good test to miss. So I played around with Gimp to get the image bright enough I could see the composition, and then relied on the fact that the lighting in the room came from few sources.

There was a lot of white and black speckling in the image, and I used the densities of the black and white areas and my memory of the composition to decide what should join up. There were some other objects in the image, which I decided to delete along with the white/black speckling that didn't add anything to the image.

I think the result, for a first time effort, was not too bad. A little bit of skill development should make quite an improvement.

136 - Hugo Demon

136 - Hugo Demon
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is Hugo, my lovely ginger cat. He, like cats do generally, like living in a community. He knows that I am the leader and that I willdo things that he finds of great interest, whether it be feeding, playing, hunting or simply sleeping (where he cuddles to my head if he is not feeling well).

At the end of the day, he's a cat. But because he is a cat, he loves to be noticed. If someone doesn't notice him, well, he will probably think they are not bright enough to do so - hardly worth bothering with, really ;)

135 - Ben at Work

135 - Ben at Work
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I made this for Ben, pictured, who was leaving his job in the office we share to break out on his own. I have known him for over a decade, and before this job we used to teach at the same school. He, like I, have little time for the kind of people who live ghetto lives, those who spend their time with other people from the country they came from for that reason only.

We have moved on, and live our lives where we live, becoming local people.

134 - Midday Carpark

134 - Midday Carpark
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

After several images deliberately worked on to be acceptable to a specific Flikr group, I thought it was time to finish this one in a way I found pleasing. I like concrete, I like cars, and I really like light - so what more could I ask for in this shot from a local mall?

I spent quite some time working on this, removing minor elements that were getting in the way of impact, and trying to achieve a good balance between light and shape - which at times seemed at odds with each other. The introduction of color was a late decision, but one that seemed to balance the light-shape issue.

One of the best bits about the opportunity was that the concrete was shiny enough to afford some reflections of the cars. I also like the idea of all these cars hiding here, out of the light.

133 - Downtown Traffic

133 - Downtown Traffic
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I enjoy investigating those things largely left unexplored by other people, and looking for ways to incorporate them into the mainstream. Destruction can be instructive too, and here I have managed to age a model and incorporate a dirty bus wheel.

Good photo opportunities do not need to be sought, they present themselves as part of the normal working day, while achieving a photo that is acceptable to a broader audience often seems to need a hunt for a suitable location.

One could say that I am easier to satisfy because I do not expect wow locations for a good photo, or even sharply focussed or suitably lit images, but that would not be true. I simply get bored with seeing essentially similar images, like that of a flower, sleek car, cute child, pretty young woman or wrinkly old person. I can Google those images in a moment, or simply look out of my window. They attract the eye and are noticed.

I like the ordinary made special by focussing attention it normally does not receive. I also think this has value to our existence, in our everyday lives.

For example, while people seem to enjoy owning cars the daily grind to or from work does not appear to be such a pleasure. What if one could ignore the large goals of getting home, the equivalent of the cute child photo, and instead could take pleasure in the dirty, rusty wheels of a smoky old truck? Or sunshine or rain on tarmac? My cat is fascinated by trucks, the larger the better, and I have no idea why, but they do make the trip to the vets more interesting.

This photo generated several 'I don't get it' comments, without specifying what it is they felt they should be getting. If you look at a picture of a flower, what is it you should be getting? Is it only a feeling of "that's nice!", in which case what are these people feeling if they are faced with things that are not nice, but not nasty either. Is their world grey with bright blobs of flowers and black blobs of pain imposed on it? And if our world is grey, are we aware of it, and does it matter? Well, it seems to matter, judging by how unhappy people become waiting for the next blob of color.

132 - Changing Times

132 - Changing Times
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is the side of the shopping pavilion I mentioned in the previous post, complete with genuine peasant farmer in the bottom right corner.

Actually, the train and the graffiti were added to the picture by me to represent the long passing of large murals on walls from the 1940s to the 1980s, and the rapid rise in graffiti over the past decade with easing access to spray paints.

I had been playing around with the train image, playing because the original train was too scruffy to be of interest to many, when I saw the opportunity to bring together several themes in one image - the architecture, murals, graffiti, and the social exclusion of the poorer classes.

131 - Life in the Past

131 - Life in the Past
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

We had a day out visiting a small national park to the southeast of Lublin, only to discover that their was almost nothing in the way of facilities for visitors, not even places to park along the roads in the woods. It was very pleasant, and using the rule of big trees = former big house or a church, we found a former dwor that has spent the years since the war as a school to sit and have lunch in the grounds.

Every village seems to have its own former manor house, and fire station, with the latter often having been built as part of the manor estate sometime prior to the second world war. Some are no longer used, but most are manned by volunteers although the costs must be relatively high and I am not sure of the level of expertise or equipment.

In Rybczewice, which had quite and extensive former estate complex including many fine limestone with red-brick-trimming buildings, also featured a renovated pavilion-style shopping building from the 1960s/70s. The latter are very common in the larger villages here, most looking sad and decayed although still generally in use, and have a single entrance and an interior divided into different shops traditionally selling food, clothes, household goods and furniture.

The image here is the telephone booth on the side of the entrance to the shopping building, and which should have been raised after a ramp for the handicapped was added a couple of years ago. TPSA, or Orange as it is now known, was the state telephone company and still retains a lot of the former thinking from the socialist era. I can quite imagine that with the increased use of mobile phones (for which there is a mast behind the building), the amount of use this phone must get is probably falling - so why bother going to the expense of resiting it? I might point out that the booth type is long out of date, and will one day soon be quite a rarity.

Steel Worker

Steel Worker
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I occasionally play around with this image, often referring to it as 'man on a beach' even though it is actually a steel worker from the Warsaw MDM district - former new center for the city in the 1950s and an interesting hotchpotch of socialist realism, classicalism and fascist power architecture.

Polish Steam

Polish Steam
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is the locomotive equivalent of an up-skirt shot, here onto the footplate cab of a steam engine. What you can see how, if you ignore all the levers and the cab walls and roof, is the rear end of the can-shaped boiler unit which is the most distinctive feature of most steam engines (other than the big wheels and the smoke stack).

This is one of a dozen or so locomotives at the Warsaw railway museum, lying unused beside the platforms of the former main station.

The funny thing is that one of the people reviewing this image for a Flickr group I had just joined suggested that this was not a museum exhibit, a comment which gave me pause for thought.

The first thing is that it is likely that he is completely unaware of the state of many exhibits in museums of the former Socialist Bloc countries, where the director of the museum cares primarily for his own position rather than for caring for the things and people within his/her care. There are exceptions, of course.

The second is that I do not normally lie, so why assume that I might? I would not assume that people are lying, but if one does lie then the assumption may be that other people are doing the same. Everyone lies at some stage, even humor is mostly controlled lies, as is any work of fiction. So, why do people feel the need to lie in situations that I do not?

Well, I do not feel the urge to lie because what I produce, and what I could also produce, is enough. I am surrounded by such large amounts of exciting, invigorating truth, what would be the point of lies?

Perhaps the answer is that other people are not always surrounded by this quantity and quality of creations from their minds. Why not? Well, the most common denominator is that other people tend to have a helluva lot more trust in the opinion of society in general. I don't because society's answer for most things is over-simplified blandness that helps only a minority.

Rather, I look at things and try to solve the problem in front of me in the context I find it, not assume an old answer from another context which has become the over-riding context for everything. This image is a good example - people assume that a photograph must show reality, because society's general experience from a previous era was that photographs replicated the reality. Of course, they ignored the work of photographers of the period who used filters, strange lenses, scissors etc. to change their images of reality. So, I get criticized for using a border on my image.

Everything has a border, here on the blog the border for the image is this blog's webpage, and ultimately the frame in our minds that we through around all objects in classifying them. I pay attention, so I see the borders/frames, so I can use them - all without attending any 'border/frame' college course.

The result is that I am involved in what the image offers, not in what society says I should be doing with my images to anything like the same degree as the critics. If a third party attempts to cititique based on the assumptions of bland, narrow society I can safely ignore them. However, if I believed in society then the criticism would be uncomfortable rejection from the group. Therefore, it becomes better to lie about what you do, and at the same time produce what society wants one to produce - blandness with occasional signs of brilliance.

I know this sounds involved, but that's how we are. We, as humans, are much greater than the pronouncements of society.

128 - Storm City Afternoon

128 - Storm City Afternoon
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

OK, this needs a bit more work to finish, but I love light and the different forms it takes. I had two photos I took in different places, but they were taken consecutively. While I was looking at the images after downloading them I could see them side by side, and that they were essentially the same image taken in two very different circumstances.

The sky and water drops is from our apartment window after a storm in the afternoon. The clouds have cleared enough to allow the sun to shine through, dazzlingly.

The traffic and street lights I took while sitting in my car waiting for the lights to change.

The third aspect is the framing, grouping the elements, separating them. Natural light and the neon of the city, natureand the products of humanity. All in harmony, only partly under our control.

127 - Late Summer Morning

127 - Late Summer Morning
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I love trees. The way they silhouette against the sky, the way they move in the wind, the shade they give on hot summer days, and the sound they make on a stormy night. When I am ill I often lay in bed or on the sofa watching the trees blow in the wind in the afternoon light, and I remember climbing different trees with my brothers when I was young.

Trees.

The framing here tries to show how I catch a glimpse of trees through my window, and then I no longer see the window but only the trees.

126 - Morning Coffee

126 - Morning Coffee
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

One of the 'easiest' things to do, other than press the button on a camera while facing a random direction, is to go find someone or a specific object and take a building much as they appear in a book. What I find harder, but also more interesting, is to take an interesting picture of something mundane. I have a lot of respect for photographers who have to take pictures of a tube of toothpaste for an advert, they have to make the mundane seem at least a bit interesting and recognisable.

What we have here is not supposed to be an exercise in product recognition, it's a cup of coffee on my desk at work with the next desk visible behind. And that is exactly what the original shows. The treatment I gave this has given me some confidence that perhaps here I have a way of dealing with those mundane images I wish to take, and I wish to take them because I see beyond the mucky façade that most people seem to focus on.

125 - Summer at the Table

125 - Summer at the Table
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

It would have been a pity not to have captured the end of summer, so many of the images I put here are darker mooded. This one lies on that edge of what I like to experiment with and what I like to do for other people or for images I wish to sell. Well, a lack of the ominous if you discount the dark framed windows and solid brick wall in the background.

It was so much fun to push the pixels around, less so for the bricks but more so for the cloth, juice and face.

Anyway, this was a party we gave for our family, in a restaurant in Lublin old town, the brick walls in the background are a survving element of the walls which once enclosed the town.

124 - Ania in the Apartment

124 - Ania in the Apartment
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I thought that since I hammered the background of the previous image, why not use the same techniques to remove all the junk that littered the background of this photo - lights hanging from the ceiling, washing on the floor and the like. This time I removed all that before I got started, so that later I could work on removing any remaining traces.

This was just a test shot, a new variation, but the composition was good and the lighting amenable. This is our flat, the wall behind Ania merely separates the bed space from the main living area, and because it meets neither the the outside wall nor the ceiling, light can move between the two areas. It has a nice architectural shape as well, one which can be taken advantage off by the lense distortion effect.

At an age when most of the people Ania works with have embraced fuddy duddy, she is feeling more free to experiment with who she is.

123 - Shade Man

123 - Shade Man
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This one was taken by my wife, but it was a good opportunity to play around more with my latest technique, especially to obliterate the background and convert it into something that adds rather than detracts from the image.

The beard was tricky as it was important not to lose the effect of the hairs, while the skin and sunglasses could be really pushed around.

Faces need special treatment, so that they retain their believability, while inanimate objects can be pushed around without the eye getting to worried. It is rather like life - people need more respect than inanimate objects or ideas. The trouble is that for many people this is not true, there is only themselves and everything else; however, they highly object to someone else including them in the 'everything else'.

122 - Chicago Sunday Morning

122 - Chicago Sunday Morning
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Ania has gone to Chicago for a couple of weeks to teach teachers how to teach Polish better. As a consequence we use Skype to keep in contact, and I took several snapshots from her webcam output. What I did not realize at the time was that the images were only some 320 pixels wide.

Is a problem really a problem, or is it an opportunity? I think problems are opportunities, but only if the way you think is to create new ideas rather than apply tradition. Problems are generally where the situation does not fit the current system, and the current system was designed in the past and is therefore a tradition. If we knew something was going to happen, it cannot be a problem as we already knew that the system was not able to cope with the predicted event and failed to redesign the system, whatever that might be and for whatever reason.

I expanded the picture so that it was 4000 pixels wide, and this meant that I had to edit all the picture to remove the blurriness. As I mentioned in a previous post, all I really need is the composition and some kind of consistent lighting, and this is maintained no matter how big the picture is made. Of course, I made a couple of poor decisions because I had not attempted this kind of expansion before, so I do not feel bad about them.

I used essentially the same techniques as I had for the earlier black and white images, although the effect is less apparent until you zoom into the image. If you do you will see it rather resembles an oil painting, and I wondered whether people would see this as a good, bad irrelevant thing.

Since I view art as being the having of ideas, I am not particularly interested in how something should be classified other than as a convenient way of talking about it that conveys something about the actual physical material (well, electronic material in this case, until I print it).

So, I have a photograph that resembles an oil painting with the two-dimensionality of a watercolor. I also pushed the pixels around the image much as one would do with a brush, spatula or fingers. In this way it seems to have invaded the arena of painting.

In painting there is a technique known as pointillism, where a small palette of primary type colors are applied to the canvas as dots of each color. Here painting is invading the arena of digital photography, although devised about a century previously.

The world is not digital, it is analogue, that is all classes blend into all others. We simply impose classes on the random potential of what could be to make communication simpler. We say a particular kind of object is a 'table' because our brains are able to classify, not because it is good for innovation.

121 - Caravan

121 - Caravan
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This time I wanted a different kind of image, still a bit two dimensional, but this time doing something with the outdoor type stuff such as clouds and vegetation. The flag and the pole turned out to be the only difficult element, they were so flimsy that it was easy to lose all definition.

This caravan was being used as a shelter/office for a car ferry across the Vistula River, although by car ferry I mean a kind of small barge able to carry up to three cars if the water was deep enough, or only 1 on this day as it was a bit shallow. I remember we used one a few miles further upstream a couple of years ago, except that the water was so low cars could not be taken and we were ferried across in a rowing boat.

These ferries struggle on, while the boats that used to ferry people up and down the river went out of business in the 1990's, probably from insufficient funding in the new reality and the easier access to cars.

I am using the caravan inserted into another picture, this time a full colour one of a church and a hill.

120 - Ania in White

120 - Ania in White
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This for me confirmed in my mind that the most important facet of the information my camera captures for me is composition, with some form of consistency of light. Colour and focus are nice, but not essential.

This means that my choice of digital camera is based upon number of pixels, the ability to zoom (until I learn how to fly), the size of the memory and, significantly, the quality of being carryable - especially since I have arthritis and thus lugging around excess weight wherever I go is undesirable.

I have occasionally played around with a function in Gimp which allows you to select a specific part of the dark and light in an image, so that once can choose to dump part of the light/dark information and let them become white or black. I used it here because I could in a single step eradicate much of the background and parts of the central vertical part of the image. Basically, I can play around with where I want the contrast to work in a single step, followed by a little minor editing of anything it missed.

It made a pleasant change not to have to worry about colour, even the continuity of focus across the various elements of the image could safely be ignored. It was rather like pushing paint around on a canvas.

This then begs the question of what is the difference between photography and painting? Could it be as simple that in one you have to learn how to draw? Composition is a matter of being able to recognize an idea and capturing it with camera or pencil, and then perhaps combining elements from different sources, mixing them up as required. More to the point, is the difference down to the choice of manual skill - drawing and mixing paint versus sliding pixels around?

I know there is a temptation to define an artist by their ability to draw and apply paint, but I know many people who can copy other people's work or render a scene in paint, and what they produce is reproduction and not a lot of art. I even know of artists who direct others to do the actual manual production of pieces under their watchful eye.

Art, I would say, occurs in the mind - the ability to compose, to have an idea and be able to visualise that idea in another medium.

This image is a series of ideas, which I then realized through my choice of equipment and practised manual skills. The idea changed as I forced it through the limitations and what manual skills and equipment I have, a kind of feedback loop that I used to generate new ideas and insights.

119 - Nightclub Stairs

119 - Nightclub Stairs
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Another city, another bar-in-a-cellar. These are not 19th century squared-off basements, these are your arched storage cellar from 200+ years ago, and often exist as a second level of basement. The steps down are not in front of the building, they go straight down under the building, and since the cellar is so deep the steps are very steep.

I wanted to create a night club feel, even if the picture was taken in the morning with sunlight streaming down the steps. There were some difficult choices to be made and it took some work not to lose all the information I wanted to keep. This is also one of those images which look better when larger - when you get closer what you see changes.

I often watch people trying to deal with painting exhibitions, especially if the exhibition follows some kind of timeline where the first pictures you see are the oldest. When face to face with some form of modern art which shows little recording-like resemblance to a distinct subject, people tend to shy away, uncertain. I like to drag people closer, to see the more three dimensional qualities that many of them have, to break down the feeling that one should say 'oh, yes, it's a bowl of fruit' but rather to engage in how the picture makes you feel, for example.

118 - Freedom

118 - Freedom
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Nothing is as it seems.

I caught Ania stretching after a picnic down near the border with Ukraine, on a track between the fields of a former state farm.

All the pixels have been wiped around, some areas removed completely. The sky is from another image, while the cloth is hand added.

Freedom comes in many different forms: Ania no longer has to live ina communist state, she and I can come here to the border and it only takes a few hours. We can have chairs to sit on, foriegn types of food to eat.

Freedom

117 - Truck Light

117 - Truck Light
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Just when I thought I had said everything I could about road pictures, along came this opportunity to show trucks in the setting sun.

Trucks spend their time carrying the things we want or need, before we are even ready to obtain them. Maybe more could be carried by rail, but are we yet ready to switch paying for road upgrades to rail upgrades?

My cat likes trucks, the sound and the moving wheels fascinate him who has spent his life far from the roadside. At 12 years old he has discovered there are more unimagined pleasures yet to be had.

In the meantime here is my simple pleasure in our amazing ability to keep so much on the move.

116 - Krakow Merryacki

116 - Krakow Merryacki
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Remember the 'god is light' image of a few blogs ago? This was my next attempt to say something about religious iconery. I have taken a picture of part of the main church overlooking the main square in Krakow old town, and played around with it.

In Krakow at Christmas time there is a tradition where locals make hand-portable religious scenes based around a church image, using lights and coloured papers and foils. Here I have the aspiring to heaven, the colour, and the simple pleasure of believing.

115 - Delivery van

115 - Delivery van
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Some days you simply want to do something different.

Mornings in breakfast began after breakfast with a coffee in the main square of the old town. It was always very busy with delivery vans and thin on the ground in terms of clients. I like vans because I like what they represent in terms of that endless shuffle of trying to get the goods in the right place at the right time. People talk endlessly about the pros and cons of different kinds of shops and other types of retail outlets, or about the kind of farming or other manufacture. What gets ignored is the intricate system of vans that bring these two pieces together.\

This is my stake in the ground - vans are worthy of mention beyond in terms of 'white van drivers'.

I also consider this a warm up for the rather delayed series on the locally made Zuk vans - from 1958 to 1997.

114 - Krakow Kowboy

114 - Krakow Kowboy
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

An experiment in colour composition and data handling. You should be able to see that I have not used the wipe technique here, but this image was an experiment in colour and the use of a tool on Gimp that gives you your choice of image information in black and white. I later images I have replaced the colour with the wipe technique, and I guess one day I will add the colour back in after the wipe technique.

Photos allow us to try out our feelings pretending to be someone else - we can be in the position/location for only enough time to take the image - but then we can return to that moment and explore it by using the photo as the memory trigger.

This was my birthday, and my wife had arranged an excellent place to have a meal in a side street in the old town of Krakow just across from the old university building, right in the window.

113 - MIG

113 - MIG
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Museums in eastern Europe are a subject in themselves, let's just say that never has so much been collected and poorly displayed by a state institution.

The funny thing about the aviation museum in Krakpw is that I could see many things I could only dream of when interested in such things as a child. Here is the front end of a 1950s MIG fighter, with the pink added by myself. This was an era when production techniques often lagged far behind the technology of the aircraft systems - here you can see quite a bit of hand worked panel beating and a landing light probably not too dissimilar to a tractor headlight faired in behind a bent perspex sheet.

It remind me of the cars of the 1950s - dreamboat styling on running gear not that much different to that of the 1920s.

What I mean to say is that it is not even close to being essential that your manual skills be close to the level of your ideas as long as your ideas are at or beyond the cutting edge. Manual skills only become important once enough people understand what is going on and can standardise the processes.

112 - Lost beginnings

112 - Lost beginnings
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

We came back from the 'away' part of our vacation with a fair few pictures for processing, but first we went to visit the family in the country where I discovered this tractor in their sandpit.

In between taking some shots in a sand pit I was reading the first few chapters of a nineteenth century children's novel, a classic if you like, that today's children have to read here in Poland. In fact, they read so much eighteenth to early twentieth century poetry and novels they later have problems valuing modern writing.

Where does this leave the modern author? With a much reduced market, sadly. Mention this in public and you are likely to be savaged by the vocal public with a Pavlovian induced respect for the the nineteenth century.

Childhood can be a treasure, but like the past it is a place forever locked away. Much as I might want to play with this tractor in the sand, I have responsibilities here, today, which cannot be ignored. I just wish people realized that this is also important for writing.

111 - Pensive Trevor

111 - Pensive Trevor
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This is the last image I did before going on vacation. The light coming in thru the blind was just too tempting to be ignored, and it seemed another good opportunity to play with the pixels.

I noticed here that the technique softens hard edges while at the same time blurring the colours together. Playing with the contrast does something similar with the colours but instead hardens the edges. However, increasing the contrast before the blending helps give the bright colours I like, and then I can take away the flaked, jagged edges.

I am still working on the use of borders, this one was quickly fabricated to apparently continue the image beyond its actual borders, but at the same time helping it to blend into its actual surroundings.

110 - Ania Blues

110 - Ania Blues
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I decided for this image to return to the wipe technique. It seemed appropriate as again I had a poorly lit image.

One of the funny things is that if you have a surface with a shine to it this method reduces that shine - as shine seems to be related to the amount of mixed different pieces of light. This is not so much of a problem for my images so far as the loss of distracting details seems to underline more what something is than the actual object. So much of what we see is stuff which blends together - trees in a wood, cars on the street, people in a bar. It can be a shock to zoom in on parts of this image and to realize just how much work the mind does in blending - because here, unlike reality, there is no ever-increasing detail layers.

This is a bar in one of the many cellars in the old town of Lublin, this one especially dark but with rather good sofas.

109- Dissolve

109- Dissolve
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This image has been surprisingly popular. For me it was both an experiment in texture and an example of what happens when you attempt to model society's moires rather than caring for what is needed.

I used to think it was just the toil of life that wore our bodies out, now I realize many other things can as well. For example, my psoriasis and arthritus ages my body while for others living the life of a model member of society gently erases their minds.

108 - God is Light

108 - God is Light
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Many people believe that their god lives in specific buildings or objects, rather than suffusing the very environment. I do not believe that we can trap gods in bricks and mortar, paint, carved wood or worked metal - just as I do not believe in being only able to invoke the past by living lives that are some replica of past lives. As a result I do not have to live to feel guilty passing from the traditional to the modern, or vice versa, everything is human expression.

A big block for my local religion is the reliance on rote - the same old images, the same old words, and no potential for much to be added to the sum. I am looking for some fresh images, ones which speak to people like me rather than having to live with those that speak to other people.

107 -Memories

107 -Memories
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Not being able to participate in a former era is no reason why we cannot attempt to recreate it. That's recreate, not replace our current reality with a former reality. Imagine remembering a food that you used to have when you were a child, we might decide to recreate it in our kitchen, sell it even. It is not the original, but we can refresh that part of our mind which recorded the flavors.

There is nothing wrong in this, but there would be a problem if we began to pressurize other people into having this dish simply because that would make them more real by engaging in a 'tradition'.

You are not more real, more genuine by replicating a past activity, you are simply at risk of becoming an overbearing tyrant sapping the will of other people to engage in activities which might be more appropriate to the current and future realities.

I enjoyed producing two images in one that took their inspiration from two eras that my wife lived through. I too, of course.

106 - Style Power

106 - Style Power
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I just love strong colours, and the use of high contrast to filter out unwanted data. Some people love to fill their homes with bits and pieces, swaths of material and intricately moulded furniture, often to make their surroundings 'homey' or 'comfortable', or even 'traditional'.

Let's take each of these in turn:

Homey. Does surrounding oneself with an excess of blurred print, line and carving make a place more like home? Is this like the fluff on the inside of a nest? Or, is this an image of a country life idealized in books? I do not mind people finding homey in these surroundings, I object to the snooty way they put down any other kind of homey. When I look around the world I see homey in all kinds of situations, many of them having no relation to a North European chintz dream. Our flat is quite minimal, we feel fully relaxed and at home - and the issue of having high-maintenance flounces and carvings does not exist. We rarely have to iron, and as a result we can find the repose in reading a book that others find working over the ironing board. Homey for me is my wife dozing off in the evening under a blanket and a cat on our reclining sofa in front of the television with a book beside her.

Comfortable. Comfort something solely detected by the skin, or do the eyes and ears also play a part. Perhaps we can define homey as comfort for the eye, and assume we are going to be considering the skin here? How many square yards or metres of padded surface do I and my family and friends need? A larger sofa might make our room more crowded or push us to buying a larger property, neither of which appeals as crowded is less homey and more space means more money and time invested in something we do not really need. Comfortable should not interfere with homey, they must compromise somewhere.

Traditional. If we all organized a huge baby swop with other couples around the world for each new-born child, one would find that, for example, a Polish-born baby brought up in the Amazon region would have no Polish but all Amazonian ideals - whatever they might be. Traditional is our local take on what is possible, largely absorbed as children. In terms of homey and comfortable in the home, traditional is impossible to achieve because the society and technology have changed - we can only seek to replicate a part, often only on a visual level. We have to make a choice between the potentially worn antique and the new replica, neither of which are 'true' as in being the actual conditions that occurred, say, 150 years ago Since tradition is a replica of the random place our family lived in when we were born, what locks us into continuing it?

Anyway this image has no chintz, it has no sop for a tradition that requires the total image area to include whatever information was present on the scene. This is an image intended to allow you mind to fill in the missing chintz - your chintz, not my chintz or the chintz of that person who lives on the other side of town or just across the road or around the other side of the planet. Your chintz.

105 - A Fear of Falling Forward

105 - A Fear of Falling Forward
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Still, divergence or not, I still had some images to process. This one captures for me, deliberately, some of the sense of growing up in the 1970s in Britain with that background threat of world destruction combined with the knowledge that the world was about to be changed.

The world did change for us, but not in the way we expected.

The Soviet threat and bombings to do with Northern Ireland - just what we needed while growing up. As an aside I wonder how many Irish Americans who helped pay for weapons for Northern Ireland raged impotently when the World Trade Centre was attacked - perhaps the fear they felt then can help them understand what they were doing to innocent children like me in a distant country.

104 - Blue John

104 - Blue John
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

If the previous image diverged in terms of the apparent and actual, this one used a new technique to achieve this. The original was very dark and poorly focussed - nothing more than one might expect from using a camera in a dark bar with no flash. However, the guy in the image I had not seen in a couple of years as he has moved back to Britain, and from that point having this image of him in an environment he is so familiar with seemed important.

While I achieved a composition that satisfied me, there seemed little else I could salvage. Anything I tried resulted in a darker image that quickly bleached if brightened. The information I was interested in was there, but the tools I was using could not differentiate between what I wanted and what I did not.

So, I decided to use the smear tool under the control of the mouse to resolve some of the problems, but quickly realized that I could apply the technique to the whole image. No pixel remains in its original place, and yet what is left is an image that contained only the information that I was interested in - the composition, plus an adequately bright image with no bleaching.

If the previous image was the first step on my latest divergence, this one was to establish the technique I would rely on to continue that divergence.

103 - Old Poland

103 - Old Poland
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

I played around with an image from the local village museum to create what at first looks like a replica of one of those old postcards - except a closer examination reveals that it has a very much different textture close up.

The past is a playground for our minds, material that people believe they understand and which we can use to convey meaning. This is the first in a digression away from my path, although like so often I can only recognise it as such now that some time has passed since I worked on this image. Here the apparent and the actual images diverge, are separated. Being distant and far from the image are no longer so strongly related.

102 - Virtual Life

102 - Virtual Life
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

As so often happens, I pulled over while driving back from a mall to take a photograph of a telecommunications company building from, I believe, the 1970s and which is reminiscent of an old 1960s portable radio set. Anyway, I still have not done anything with either of the images I took of that, but instead I have of this new housing block I noticed on the other side of the road.

The white face silhouettes are from another picture of Ania, and are perfect reflections - it is the building which distorts the image.

We all live in sets of virtual realities, where we distinguish between a skirt and a kilt even though there is no real distinction, they are both bits of cloth wrapped around us. What happens if a man wears a 'skirt' in public, though, and what if he wears a 'kilt'?

The purpose of art is to break through these virtual realities to show that other existences also exist. This is not to infer that art is for the domain of pleasure or work, art works in both and elsewhere, everywhere we exist.

Going to see art in galleries is not about learning about those artists, rather they are places we know that we will be exposed to art and then, by practice in recognition, we should be able to recognise art anywhere, in any field, including technology or picking rags from the side of the road.

100 - My Fist Remembers...

100 - My Fist Remembers...
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This started off with a wish to do something for one of the Flickr groups, which I then decided against as I could not be bothered to go to the effort of photographing myself, but then when I saw what the target for the day was and decided I could do it with nothing more than the small pile of objects that end up like driftwood around my keyboard.

The aim was to take an image that was reminiscent of the 'no image' graphic used by Flickr for members who have yet to put up a thumbnail of themselves - or whatever.

My belief is that if you spend too much time looking for material, you are not focussing on the prime task, practicing avoidance, or you are doing it for someone else. The memory stick and press stud were there and were enough to produce the face like image on my hand, what more would one need?

I was not really serious about the image, I just happen to like some of the people in the group, including my younger brother. I almost only saved it as a jpeg image, but at the last minute saved it as a gimp file - which is lucky as the imagery I put in ended up being a lot more powerful on a personal level than I had expected.

People who fight a lot tend not to forget, perhaps because it gives further excuse for the excitement of further fights, whatever. The psoriasis is there, and I do remember what my hand was like before it came, and it is a big, visible part of my life.

I love the color, the expression, the rough and flakey nature of the skin, and even the position - although why I chose my right hand I do not know as it was harder to use my camera with my left hand.

Still, as I worked with the image, I worked my thoughts into it, trying to look for and show those things that I find important. In many ways it is rather like playing lucky dip with your mind, the actuality of playing with your thoughts bring on unexpected ones.

101 - Bad Gurls Dont Grow Old

101 - Bad Gurls Dont Grow Old
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

On the saturday I played around with some images, but I was too tired to concentrate. However, by the next day my mind was ready and I produced a stream of images, including a couple which we will not be publishing yet as some of Ania's students and compatriots would not understand.

I was pleased with the basic shot, as I had taken it while on the stairs in our block on our way to work. I might point out that the graffiti is from elsewhere, nearer where we used to live.

I like graffiti a lot as for many people it has been the only way they could express themselves publicly and get away with it, especially when at an age that no one else wants to listen or from a background that has little in the way of voice in society. Since the 1990s there has been an explosion in the quality and color of graffiti here as access to the materials required has improved. Their has also been a shift away from political/racist graffiti to the personal.

I was rather pleased to be able to insert the graffiti into this image, even though I made a few mistakes in the original, some of which made their way into the final image.

Interestingly, graffiti lends itself to this kind of transform. For example, the original was painted on a rough surface and I was able to use a wipe tool to wipe away most of the apparent surface imperfections much as if I were wiping around the wet paint of the original. Secondly, since most graffiti appears on flattish surfaces, it is easy to change its perspective - so this one went from a front-on image to one made to look as if it were on a receding wall. I look forward to using more graffiti - and I would like to thank the unknown artist.

Anyway, the key thing is Ania, and doing the kind of things that help to improve her confidence and success, so that she can follow her own path and achieve what she desires in spite of the people who in the past and present have tried to keep her in check.

She's my bad girl, and I love her.

100 - Blue Car Jazz

100 - Blue Car Jazz
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

This image was part done on my computer for several weeks, with only the blue treatment and the black background done. I wanted to add some kind of light treatment to the background to show the traffic bending away into the distance. The problem - my lack of drawing skills.

Then I came across some images of lights from an even older stalled project where I failed to photograph the lights of cars at night to anything like close to my satisfaction - it was freezing, I could not find a good location to take the picture, and the traffic was bolshy.

OK, the lights showed the camera had moved, but that was the effect I was after in comparison to the precise focus of the foreground.

Our expectations are a great thing when we are looking forwards to an event, with our minds filling in the gaps in the unknown future with our expectations from the past. Sometimes the actual event is better, sometimes it is worse - but it is always at least partly unpredictable.

Not knowing fully where a picture will take me is part of the interest I have in them, they allow me to explore things that would otherwise go unregarded in my mind.

099 - Saving the Woman

099 - Saving the Woman
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

Damn, this was a hard picture, I got caught half way through and could not see a way to complete. The answer was to accept that I had already used all my known methods on previous images and had no desire to go down those roads again. I mean, some of my previous methods had already been used, such as cutting out and use of high contrast, highly used already in many cases. The problem is that if you keep repeating the same techniques the results tend to become samey - they transfer from being innovation into skill training.

I am skilling on contrast and cutting out parts of images, and there is nothing wrong with practising skills - but you have to be careful that they don't take over. What I had was an odd shaped image of a woman and a picture and no idea how to balance it all up. I could have researched, I could have asked someone for advice - but what I wanted to do was resolve the problem myself, using my mind.

Eventually I modified my border skills, and experimented with a color palette (pale blues) that I rarely touch. Eventually it came right, proved popular - and only then did I see that I had resolved another issue that has intrigued me for some weeks - how to produce a gold effect. Look closely at the text - that is the most convincing gold I have ever produced, and it is related to the use of a pale blue filter layer.

Another thread of thought was based on my trying to conviince Ania that many of the things we do are wrong, because they simply follow what society dictates. The problem is that most of society is made up not of winners but of also-rans. This is not to be derogatory, but as in the case of fashion to dress in old styles today instantly makes you recognisable as being old from down the street, but that is the pressure of society, of also-rans.

Now, imagine that you want to be a winner - how are you going to win if you copy the average performance of the people around you? How are you going to beat the people already leading?

The answer is that IF YOU WANT TO BE THE BEST, DON'T FOLLOW THE REST, do something else. If you dress old, people will first assume you are old and hence think old. Dress current, and people have to categorise you different, whether they like it or not

098 - First Exhibition

098 - First Exhibition
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

These are two images from my first exhibition - Beautiful Lublin.

I want to support Lublin in bringing its identity into closer focus, showing people who live here more about what the city and region is as opposed to classical views on what culture should be - theatre, oil paintings and people playing violins.

The printing of books was an opportunity for the educated classes to hijack society's image of culture and twist it to fit some Western part of a European models, especially that of Latin and Greek models. I am part of a movement to try and revitalise culture, not in a cutesy overly-romantic way, but by showing people what is there so that they get the choice of what they want to call culture and nevber having to feel ashamed of it. This might sound old hat to a Westerner, but it is cutting edge thought here in Eastern Europe.

I would like to thank my wife for taking this picture, and everyone who helps to write and maintain Gimp photo-editing software for giving me the tools to convert the blurry, badly lit original into this sharp result.

The image on the right is of Jesus on a steel tube spaceframe cross, built for the visit by former pope, John Paul II, who once used to teach at the city's Catholic university.

097 - Danger on the Streets

097 - Danger on the Streets
Originally uploaded by gingerpig2000

The photograph was taken by my wife on the street where she works. I wanted to incorporate a number of different feelings in the image - that of morning, noon and night - and at the same time stress the dangers of the road. Alternatively, one can see day and night on either side of the hazard that is present all the time.

Here in Poland the effect of society has long been to make people selfish - to consider themselves as human and others as objects. Power over others is an important essence, and once understood the apparently random stupidity of many drivers begins to make sense.

In Poland, a car driver feels more powerful than a pedestrian, and the weaker must get out of the way of the more powerful. Society remains unaware of the underlying cause, and then people make a big fuss when someone dies. Too damn late - make the fuss BEFORE someone dies.