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.