I returned to the Barrington River for today's shot. There was some overcast, so I knew the sun would be hidden sufficiently to get this shot. On a sunny day at noon, this would be shooting right into the sun, so I really needed today's cloud cover to make it work.
There are a couple of small docks here, and the closest one has a couple of channel markers lying in the snow. The reflections both on this dock and on the one behind it made the shot a bit more interesting, and I tried to incorporate a bit of both in the overall composition.
Post processing was a lot of fun. I'm testing a full-function demo of Topaz Adjust, and two of the layers in this image are from that plug-in. I used a Topaz filter that produces a dramatic high dynamic range image, and then did a darker color blend of a filter that produced a strong detail image. From there, I used a Photoshop filter to find all the edges and blended that using a 55% pin light overlay. A half dozen level adjustment layers at various points, coupled with a saturation adjustment and a deep blue photo filter completed it. I opted not to add a background texture since the pin light blend mode already produced a bit of a speckled effect. I hadn't originally planned to go with this cartoon drawing image, but after seeing what the last overlay produced, I liked it so much that I kept it as the finished product.
