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.