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.

MMM ~ Week 1 ~ Assignment 1

Last week was the start of the course Mastering Manual Mode at Big Picture Classes. I signed up for it because after 3/4 of a year with my DSLR, it was about time to master the basics. I changed to Aperture Priority mode very quickly and more or less mastered when to use which aperture for best results. Occasionally, usually for night shots, I used Shutter Speed Priority, but only rarely. ISO I usually ignored completely and let the camera deal with it. The only in camera adjustments I did was exposure but that was basically it.

So now, with the beginning of the new year and the beginning of my creative journey, I thought it was perfect time to get into Manual.

I did the first assignment last Sunday but when I wanted to process the images, I realised that I did it all wrong because, of course, as usual, I hadn't read the instructions properly. As we were supposed to take different images in and around our house in the daylight, I had to wait until today, my day off, to do it again.

The assignment was to take pictures of the same subject in different lighting situations, with the camera set on program mode and ISO to 400, and to make a note of shutter speed and aperture for each image. I processed each image in PSE8 with slight adjustments of levels and/or saturation.

It's already week 2 actually, and the next assignment is waiting. I'll be working on that tomorrow afternoon or Sunday - but this time reading through it properly first! :-)