It was a B&W the minute I observed this unique harbor masters boathouse covered with Lobster traps floats reflecting in the York harbor tides. Why ? The boathouse is a grayed weather worn cedar shake, the lobster traps had lost all their color and were primarily reflecting white and the ocean current in the foreground was a monotone green. There really is no color here to speak of.
The creative part of the capture was framing the subject and waiting for some interesting currents. I also wanted to get the shadows and rocks beneath the boat house, but that wasn’t going to happen in one image, so I overexposed one image two stops to get those particular shadows. The key to a good B&W for me is to process the color image first. Get rid of your color coast, look for contrast opportunities to enhance your subject and move your viewers eyes. You don’t want to go too contrasty because you could get the wall behind the traps looking like a black grid.
As far as Black and white, I took the image into NIK SEP2 and after bring it back into photoshop, I wasn’t all that thrilled with the global tonal colors, so I made a selective color adjustment on the image and set my neutral to +10 Yellow, -10 Black, then put a mask on the layer, this tweak now gives the ocean water a slightly green tint.
