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.