Royal Border viaduct in black and white

Firstly happy new year to you and thanks for looking at my picture.

Its been a while since I posted and decided yesterday to take my new 5D MkII out for a spin so hope you like the result.

Canon EOS 5D MkII with battery grip and Canon 17-40 F4L. 24mm ~ 4 seconds ~ F18.0 ~ ISO 50 ~ pattern metering ~ ND8 filter.

Metered this picture for the sky and also set the 5D MkII to underexpose by 1 stop which along with the ND filter and small aperture allowed the 4 second exposure.

Opened in Photoshop CS5 and created a duplicate layer. Altered curves on the new layer to lighten the detail on the bridge and then erased everything in that layer except the bridge and its reflection. Darkened the original layer using cureves and then merged the two layers.

No noise to remove because of the low ISO (also meant a smaller file size because of the lack of noise).

Reduced picture size to 800 on longest edge and then created another duplicate layer and used a high pass filter and set the light as hard light (effectively sharpening the picture) and then merging the layers again.

Boosted contrast slightly. Voila.