I really wanted to do a black and white photo today, and with the really crisp blue skies I decided to make it a water scene. My initial thought was to grab a shot of the densely packed boats in one of several marinas in Warren, but on a whim I decided to check out the Warren Town Wharf first. Just as I arrived I spotted this cabin cruiser heading up the river and knew immediately that it would provide a better compositional dynamic than just the stills of moored boats. There's really nothing special about the story itself, but from a purely artistic perspective I liked the mood and overall composition.
Post processing was almost exclusively done in Topaz B&W Effects. I used the classic filter as the best and fine tuned the tonal range using the contrast, boost black, boost white, and adaptive exposure sliders. I also adjusted each of the color sensitivity sliders to produce the right contrast in sea and sky. Back in PSE I used Neat Image to eliminate all the noise caused by the high contrast boosts. I then topped it off with a sepia photo filter.
