What do you do on a wet, grey, rainy day? Why, take a wet, grey, rainy photo and turn it into a greyscale image, of course! These boats have been moored in this spot for several days, so when I stepped out into the rain at lunch I knew it would be a good opportunity to photograph them. Seeing them lined up like this sort of reminded me of a couple of boats at the starting line of a race, hence the caption. I knew I was going to process this as a black and white when I took the shot, so I composed it for contrast. I wanted to be sure to capture some of the nice, dark, arches under the bridge, and the slack tide helped add an interesting texture to the water.
Post processing was your basic black and white conversion. I duplicated the background layer and then desaturated the duplicate, switching the blend mode to color. I made a slight levels adjustment between the two layers, and then made a levels adjustment above the desaturated layer. (In this case, the placement of the levels layers makes a significant difference. The histogram between the two are remarkably different.) The final layer was a simple sepia photo filter. The black border was produced using a fill layer and the paint bucket tool dropping a layer of black over the 1/8 inch selection around the image.
Thanks, everyone! I really wasn't sure when I took it how this one would come out. I'm glad you like it.