Fences & Fridays

I'm taking a little break from Flickr at the moment, and it's doing me good. Flickr, blogging, painting and all the photography project I was trying to do (and failing rather miserably at it) all together just take a lot of time and more and more often I felt like I wasn't able to do everything properly anymore, giving everything the time and attention it needd and deserved. So I had cut back on something. And as I was beginning to feel a little bit frustrated about Flickr for various reasons (and probably all the wrong ones), I thought it was a good idea, to take some time off.

However, there are a few things I really enjoyed and rather miss. Among these is Fence Friday. I never thought how much fun it would be to take pictures from fences. But it is, and I'm always amazed at where I find them and all the wonderful fences there are out there. They come in all kinds of shapes, materials, sizes and states, and trying to catch them at their best angle is a great challenge. So even though I'm giving Flickr and the Fence Friday Groups a break, I kept looking for those fences and taking pictures. And so I'm just going to do my own little Fence Friday series here on my blog.

So here's this week's fence, a shot taken three weeks ago during my London holiday, in the park of Kenwood House in Hampstead Heath:

And a little mosaic of some of past fences which I took for and posted at Flickr:

I'm not sure if I'll manage to post one every Friday, but I will try. And as to Flickr, I still enjoy having a look from time to time at the streams of some of my friends and contacts, and occasionally leave a comment, and even post an image for one of the projects I'm trying to do. But I quite enjoy not 'having' to be there all the time, feeling bad if I don't manage to keep up with comments and all. Don't know when, and if, I'm returning to Flickr. At the moment, focusing on my blogs, getting out my paints and stuff and taking my camera on a walk through the woods keeps me busy enough. Ah, and there's work stuff as well. I've registered for chartership with CILIP ages ago, and it's high time I finally put my portfolio together and get it over and done with. So that'll certainly keep me busy as well.

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!