Yesterday I mentioned that I'm a bit of a history buff. What you may have also noticed by now, is I'm fascinated by ruined or decaying buildings. Today's photo took me to the Oakland Village section of Burrillville since a friend of mine tipped me off to a number of potentially interesting shots in this historic mill village. I originally intended to photograph an old train depot, but instead I spotted this burned out husk of a building barely standing on the edge of a river. It was just begging to be photographed, and I was forced to oblige.
I played around with a number of different post-processing techniques. I tried it in a monochrome copper, a traditional black and white, and a couple of other color techniques, but I discarded all of them. Finally, I fell back on this "old faithful" technique that I've used several times. I ran it first through Redynamix - my HDR effect filter - but toned down the saturation and surface smoothness just a bit. In Photoshop I applied a very thick poster lines filter, added a very rough sandstone texture, and then toned down the saturation some more. I added a levels adjustment and finally a warming filter to complete the image. The colors in the original were too interesting to waste on a monochrome, and this type of processing gave it a much more interesting effect than a traditional image.
