Title • Venice Carnival 2013 #16

Since I launched this blog back in 2003 I've retained pretty much the same workflow: any images I'm currently working on sit in a folder called 'working files'. In the early days there were never more than a dozen or so images in there at any one time: I worked on them, got to the point that I was reasonably happy with how they'd turned out, and then blogged them. Today, there are 139 images: ones that I'm still working on but can't get right, and some of them have been there for at least two years. I should probably just give up on at least some of them, but in each case there's something about them that I like - I just can't get them right.

And my reason for mentioning that is that I've come up with a new way of dealing with them. Rather than just randomly opening one, working on it, then closing it again because I can't work out quite what I want it to say, I've been trying a different approach: deciding on a specific strategy then seeing which images it will work with. In this case, and for another three that I'll probably post next week, the strategy was 'high contrast black and white'. It didn't work with quite a few that I tried, but I think it works well with this one.