I seldom rely on special effects to enhance my photographs. I prefer to keep things pretty much as I saw them. But every now and then an opportunity comes along to try a graphic technique that might help tell my story more effectively. Such is the case here. The key to this image is the flow of the ripples in the water of the Beagle Channel, a vital waterway which carried our ship from the end of Argentina into the Drake Passage and on down to Antarctica. The procession of soft horizontal ripples covers more than half the picture. The sky also seems rippled by two horizontal clouds. In between them, snow-clad mountains plunge straight down into the water. The ripples have a calming effect. To intensify the calmness of the scene, I needed to simplify an already simple picture to an even greater degree. In effect, I needed to recompose the picture by removing every superfluous element I could. To do this, I removed all color from the image in Photoshop, converting it to a black and white picture. This offered a very clean, abstract look, but it was still a bit too harsh for the point I was trying to make. I then added brown to the mix, making this photo into a duotone. Brown is a warming color and calming color. The ripples became as soft as velvet – exactly the effect I wanted. I had captured feel of the Beagle Channel as I remembered it on that evening – almost as smooth as glass. A far cry from the churning waters of the Drake Passage that lay dead ahead.