For today's photo, I parked at India Point Park and walked down to the Fox Point Hurricane barrier hoping to find some interesting scenery to photograph. This fisherman was sitting in the sparse shade along the boardwalk hoping to catch a passing striped bass or bluefish. Mind you, I haven't heard of any biting in this area for several weeks, but that didn't stop him from trying.
An interesting bit of trivia related to this spot goes back to 1961. A small pilot whale managed to get stuck just past the bridge seen in this photo. Local residents were fascinated by the whale and lined the shores of the river to watch him swim in very short circles looking for a way out. They nicknamed him "Willie the Whale" and he became a bit of a local celebrity. Attempts to assist him back out to sea failed, however, and Willie died about a week into his venture up the Providence River. I was three years old at the time, but I vividly remember going to the river with my parents to see Willie. I also remember being extremely disappointed in my first glimpse of a live whale. You see, at 3-years old, my idea of what a whale should look like came from the cartoons, and a pilot whale falls far short of those impressive boat-swallowing drawings.
Post processing started with a brilliant cold filter in Topaz Adjust. I then adjusted adaptive exposure, regions, and protect highlights. The original layer was then brought into Topaz B&W FX and I also produced a black and white by adjusted adaptive exposure, regions, contrast, boost black, and boost white. In PSE I placed the b&w layer on top of the color layer using a 3-pixel radius high pass filter in soft light blend mode. A levels adjustment was applied to the final image.
