I am just getting over the flu which waylaid me last week, and in addition to missing work I had to cancel one scheduled photo shoot, plus any random photography. To try to ease the jonesing, I went into the vault to give a second look at images worth working on, and ended up with today’s image.

An old photography trick for making flowing water look more like flowing water is to slow the shutter speed down so the water blurs and retains a sense of movement. Of course, the expectation is that one is a) using a tripod and b) on solid ground when trying to create this shot. In my case, neither applied as this image was made on the PAB 2010 boat cruise on the Ottawa river this past June.

Even with the Vibration Reduction enabled on my Nikon D90, it took shot after shot (at 1/3 second, handheld) to get what I was looking for.

What really made the image for me though, was when I converted it to Black and White with Apple Aperture the other day during my flu-driven incarceration;  using a red filter setting with higher structure dialed in, the modified image provided an intensity that was not there for me in the color version.

It is ironic that digital technology both made the image feasible in the first place, and enabled me to make it look analog.