This boat on the river in Richmond, caught my eye and the Fuji Finepix S3 Pro caught every detail of the water in a wonderful way.

Richmond has been my recent hunting ground for photos and I like the wintery light of this shot of the river and hill

What are we coming to when a statue needs its own CCTV camera?
Richmond - March 06 

This is a picture I took in Richmond Park last week and really like. The Fuji Finepix S3 Pro in Raw mode with the Nikon 12-24mm F4 lens, picked out every detail that was there. Desaturating and toning then gave it an interesting "edge".

I recently discovered the Lenswork website which is an extremely well written site about the "96-page, 7x8½" Lenswork paperback magazine -- a book-quality, paper-based, anthology-style periodical publication which focuses on photography and the creative process. Each issue featuring articles, interviews, and photographic portfolios. Non-technical and non-academic, with emphasis on the creative aspects of photography, LensWork is published six times a year" .

On it there is a great podcast page and I was drawn to the article intriguingly entitled:

"Begin the Beguining - How will your creative vision differ from that of other photographers working with the same image? We're posing an experiment! We've posted three images to download from our website for you to do whatever Photoshop/ darkroom type work you want to. Email us your results, and we'll publish everyone's images as a Acrobat PDF in a future issue of LensWork Extended. Good luck and be creative!"

I did download the three pictures and had great fun modifying them. I show below the original with my version along side - what do you think?

Here I used a layer to desaturate the image, then a quickmask to expose the colour of the bike then added a little glow.

On the landscape I used layers with different blending options, saturation and glow to give a darker more mysterious image.

Finally on the Abstract picture I used Hue and saturation to add colour, distorted the image using spherical filter, added triangular extrusion and then increased the canvas size using different colour backgrounds horizontally and vertically.

Have I improved them, or made them worse? How will they compare with what others do/ Its really interesting what Lenswork final PDf will come out with. It raises so many questions about what is art and photography etc.

Self portrait