Every now and then, plans really do work out as intended. When I went in search of today's photo, I had "solitude" in mind, and I was hoping to find a single horse in a pasture - preferably at the far end of a pasture. I wanted to show a wide expanse with a single horse dwarfed by the landscape. The most likely place to find such a scene relatively close to me in Rhode Island was in either Foster or Scituate. They are both very rural communities and there are a fair number of horse farms in both towns. I was not disappointed. On Central Avenue in Scituate I spotted this solitary horse grazing around the back of his pasture. The hay wagon and barn made it perfect. Rather than zooming in on the horse, as would be my natural tendency since I'm still ribbed by some friends over photos of very tiny grizzly bears taken on an Arctic backpack in Alaska, I went to the other extreme and attempted to encompass the overall scene. It's a bit out of my comfort zone since I tend to want to focus entirely on the animal, but then, going beyond the comfort zone is a major reason I'm doing this project.
For post processing I again turned to black and white. I'm finding that I really like black and white scenes. They seem to be more dramatic, somehow, than their color counterparts. I opted, in this case, not to add any Topaz Adjust filters. I did add a deep blue photo filter to the sky just to tone the luminosity down a notch. Black and white conversion was done with a gradient map in color blend mode. I adjusted the levels slightly, and also adjusted both brightness and contrast. The top layer was a sepia photo filter.
