Merrimack River Current (Posterized Photo)

Merrimack River Current (Posterized Photo) Originally uploaded by randubnick

Last week I went up to Manchester, New Hampshire, to take pictures of the Merrimack River for a series of paintings I am going to do. The weather was against me; it was cold and rainy, and the sky was a dull gray. But I managed to take over fifty photos to use as reference. Editing the photos gives me a chance to think about how I want to approach the subject matter. I like the patterns created by the river current, so I cropped a bit of that out of one of the photos. Then I opened the image in Painter IX to posterize it. But I still wanted to add some color to see how the river might look under a colorful sky, so I used a transparent color overlay. Then I cropped the image again to get the composition I wanted. Whether or not I use this image as the basis for a painting, I decided that I like it for its own sake, so I am posting it here.