16 Fences

I joined quite a few groups on Flickr over the past year. There are basically two types of groups: On the hand those to which I add pictures to when I have a picture that fits the group, and on the other ones those for which I specifically take a picture for. I like contributing to both types of groups but I really appreciate the challenge that the latter kind of group poses. Some of them even have weekly themes within the theme of the group, which makes it even more of a challenge. One of my favourite themed group is Fence Friday. There are at least three different groups, the original fence friday group, fenced friday and fench friday (which is benches and fences). The idea is, obviously, to post pictures of fences on a Friday.

I had come across Fence Friday quite a while before I joined the group. I admired the pictures people took of fences, the variety of ordinary, extra-ordinary and simply beautiful fences. But I somehow doubted that I would find enough fences to post a fence shot every Friday. And then I decided to give it a try and joined. And now I'm addicted to fences :-). And I've never had trouble to find a fence. In fact, after I joined the group I realised how many fences there are everywhere and how many different fences I pass almost every day without even realising. I took the first deliberate fence shot on Friday, 7 August 2010 and posted it on 27 August and I haven posted 16 shots to the fence friday groups and taken innumerous more.

In this mosaic are these 16 first fence shots and I'm looking forward to taking and posting many more this year.

I also like going through these pictures and seeing how I developed my post processing skills in the months since August. Last year, I was using Picnik a lot for processing. I loved especially the 1960s and cinemascope effects and the rounded corner option but I was sometimes a bit frustrated about the limitations and would have preferred to be able to achieve these effects in PSE8 myself. In the last few weeks I've learnt a lot about post processing and am now working almost only with PSE. I finally even now how to do rounded corners in PSE :-).

There's still so much to learn about PSE and I'm so looking forward to continue working with and learning more about it. I'm acompletely addicted to using textures at the moment and hope to soon learn how to do textures myself, both digital and handmade ones. And I also hope to be able to fix the actions problem one day. I don't know what the problem is, but I just can't find the right folders for saving them and I soooo want to use them!

So I keep working on improving my post processing PSE8 skills (hoping also to be able to get a full Photoshop version soonish) and to take pictures of fences.

Have a wonderful Fence Friday!