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.