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.