Day 149 - Sitting on the fence

I'm trying to train myself to look for interesting photographs in places and situations that just don't seem to promise much. To find beauty in squalor, so to speak.

Okay, maybe not quite squalor, but you catch my drift.

When I saw this battered old fence, losing the battle against the bushes behind it, I thought I'd found exactly what I've been looking for.

Then it became a question of how to photograph it: go in close or pull way back; include just the fence and the fern or put it into a context; focus on the first couple of slats or try to ensure the entire line of pickets is crisp and clear.

I'm not sure if I should have included the baby-blue wall in the left-hand side of the frame. I like it, to be sure, but I wonder if the photo would be more effective with just the fence and the bush. The focus question introduces, once again, the limitations of my Olympus, since I just can't make the aperture so wide and the shutter speed so fast to create the kind of shortened depth of focus that I would want to get. Still, I'm quite happy with the photograph. It makes me feel quite serene, for some reason.