I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of days mulling over what to do for this week’s Photo Friday challenge – Man – and in the end decided to go for a self-portrait. Part of the reason is that this is something I’ve intended to do for a while – i.e. see whether I can take any half decent photographs of myself – but there are two other reasons. First; I thought it was only fair after posting numerous nude pictures of my wife recently (when she was either pregnant, or just after she gave birth). Second; there’s been an interesting discussion over on my other (textual) blog regarding the various ways in which women are portrayed photographically (including a discussion of my entry for the Photo Friday Woman challenge). So, in light of both those points, I thought it was only fair that I posted some nude shots of myself ;-)

This image is composed of two originals taken a couple of minutes apart, and other than some levels and curves adjustment, and a slight alteration to the colour balance, I haven’t done too much to it other than blur the final result. I did want to leave this as a reasonably straight shot but, frankly, I’m not quite photogenic enough for that ;-)

Since I first saw Ansel Adams' photograph – Aspens – I've wanted to take something similar, not just in terms of the subject matter, but also something that captures the massive resolution and pin-sharp clarity of his work. And while the latter (unless I invest in a 5x4" plate camera) will probably always elude me, the ‘feel’ of that image (or others in that series) is probably something I can aspire to.

This series of images is reasonably close to what I’m after but I’m not convinced that they’re all that great, mostly I think because I had to do to much work to them to bring them in line with how I imagined they should look. I took the original about a week ago under less than ideal circumstances. We’d gone for a walk and the sky was flat and dull – a rather typical British winter sky – and I think, if I were to do this image again, I’d need a slightly more dynamic original to work with.

And finally; I’ve included three versions because I couldn’t decide which I liked best. That said, I think that the full colour version is probably the easiest to look at, and the black and white version the least good – mainly because there wasn’t really sufficient contrast in the original (i.e. this version, to me at least, looks rather too artificial).

This week I fully intended to get out and about and take some pictures for this week’s Photo Friday challenge – Motion. But our two youngest have been ill, and it’s work tomorrow, so I suspect that I wont have the opportunity to take much of anything in time to submit it.

So, I decided to do some work on this image instead, mainly because I really didn’t have anything more suitable to use. Oddly, out of several thousand photographs I’ve taken in recent years, not one of them has much to do with motion. I suspect this says something about how I see my photography, but I haven’t had the time to think it through, so I wont speculate – I will think about it though.

But back to this image: it’s a series of overlapping segments that are increasingly blurred the further you move away from the center of the Ferris Wheel. The blurring was achieved in two steps: first, I used Photoshop’s radial blur (set to zoom), then added a (Gaussian) blurred version of that layer set to Overlay blending mode. My hope, in the absence of a ‘real’ image of something that conveys motion, is that this image goes some way towards capturing this theme.

This was one of the images I nearly used for last week’s Photo Friday challenge – Woman. One of the difficulties I’ve had with recent challenges, having decided that come hell or high water I will enter something each week, is that I’ve been using images from the archives as (for various reasons) I haven’t had too much time to take anything new. But most of the pictures I’ve taken over recent years have been family pictures (of one sort or another) and this means, when the theme is something like Woman, that I have hundreds of pictures to choose from. Obviously not all of these are worth putting up here, but there are often quite a few I can choose from.

So this was my second choice and, on reflection, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as good as the one I did use, technically, aesthetically, or in terms of interpreting the Photo Friday theme. I think that part of the problem I had with this one, as with a lot of my older images, is that they were taken with a Fujifilm FinePix 40i and the quality of the originals isn’t all that great. Which, if I’m honest, is one of the main reasons I’ve used a 'diffused' look for a lot of my recent images; i.e. because it hides some of the more noticeable deficits in the originals (jpeg artefacts, image noise etc.).

All that said though, I do like this image.

At the start of this year the Photo Friday site introduced a new policy whereby the six noteworthy images for each challenge are picked by the people who view the site rather than the site organisers, Marc and Nick. One consequence of this decision, at least as I see it, is that there now seems to be more of a ‘community spirit’ among the various people who contribute; e.g. it seems as though there have been more comments left on our respective web sites, and more discussion between people than there was under the previous system – all of which is a good thing.

One image from this week’s challenge – Woman – that I was particularly drawn to, was by Squishybear – a very powerful self-portrait that I really think captures this theme perfectly. Following an email discussion and a couple of blog entries, regarding both this theme and our respective entries (on my site and hers), we decided that it would be interesting to do a joint entry for this week’s challenge – hence these images.

The original photographs were all taken by Squishybear and the subsequent work in Photoshop was done by me. It’s been a while since I did any work on an image that I didn’t take so it’s been interesting reinterpreting somebody else’s work for this theme.

This week’s Photo Friday challenge – Woman – left me in something of a quandry, mostly because I really wanted to reuse the various images I’ve posted recently of my wife when she was pregnant in 2001. The images I’ve already used were taken six days before our daughter was born, and would have been excellent for this week’s challenge, not least because they capture so many aspects of womanhood – sensuality, motherhood, pregnancy, power … and so on. But I promised myself that I wouldn’t reuse any images for these challenges so, for a while, I wasn’t too sure what to use.

I did think about trying to take some pictures this week, but my wife and our two youngest have been ill over the last few days so nobody was really in the mood for taking any new pictures – so it was back to the archives. And then I found this one, taken six days after the previous images, and just over one hour after our daughter was born.

I decided it would be suitable for this week’s challenge for many of the reasons mentioned above, but there’s also a slight tongue-in-cheek element with the phone. My wife would probably argue that this is just another example of multi-tasking – giving birth, breastfeeding, talking on the phone – but it struck me that the image does portray something (stereo)typical of womanhood. But, more importantly, it captures some of the happiness of those first few hours, something that’s always worth recording :-)

This week’s Photo Friday theme has caused me a bit of a problem in that the brief is to “submit your link in our Best of 2003 Challenge and show everyone the one photo you took in 2003 that is your very best work”. The problem I have with this is that my best work for 2003 has already been posted on this site. It’s only over the last few months that I’ve become sufficiently skilled with Photoshop to produce images that I’m happy with and all of those have already been used – hence my problem.

I think the best images I've created this year (aesthetically speaking) are the three ‘almost desaturated’ images of my wife when she was pregnant (1, 2, and 3), but I couldn’t think of an easy way to rework any of these as I’ve already posted colour versions of all three.

So, in light of the above, I decided to revisit one of my other favourites for this week’s challenge. Unfortunately it’s a version of last week’s entry that I used for the Treasured challenge but I do think this is one of the nicer images I’ve produced this year and, from a technical angle, I think it’s probably one of my better efforts. When I used this image last week I didn’t have too many problems with it in that reducing the image to black and white and lightening it removed (or masked) most of the problems with the original (colour noise and a number of noticeable jpeg artefacts). This version took a couple of hours to produce and was much more of a challenge. And while I think I prefer the various black and white versions I do like this one too.