The day I had for shooting on the water in New York was the one day it rained. But light during stormy weather can make for interesting images. Photographer Hank Gans and I braved the storm and proceeded as planned despite the seriously squally weather.

This image shows upper New York Bay, often simply called New York Harbor with the lower Manhattan skyline in the background. Upper New York Bay is fed by the Hudson River, which is connected to the shipping channels out to the Atlantic Ocean via the Narrows and Lower New York Bay, and to Long Island Sound via the East River (which despite the name is actually a tidal strait).

In this image you can see a Staten Island Ferry plowing through the waves in front of the inaptly-named Freedom Tower, which is going up near the World Trade Memorial.

The three versions of Storm in Upper New York Harbor in this story are shown in reverse of the order in which I made them during post-production. The actual RAW image file is fairly flat, so I processed the color image to add contrast and drama (below).

Once I was happy with the color version I used Nik Silver Efex 2 to convert the image to monochromatic (above). At that point, I thought I was done—but the idea of playing with textures called out to me, hence the painterly version at the top of this story.