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.