I’ve been doing some traveling for work over the last couple of weeks, and last week I found myself in New Buffalo Michigan right by the lake. Saturday morning I had some down time so I decided to drive over to Indiana Dunes State park to check it out. I’ve never been, and the overcast skies and fog seemed like it would lend itself to some fairly dramatic photos. In typical fashion… it did and it didn’t. The overcast sky wasn’t quite as dramatic as I expected, and the most interesting visuals came from the textures of the shelf ice right on the lake shore. By the way, did I mention it was freezing? The readout in the rental car said it was 32 degrees, but after 30 minutes my hands were aching from the cold, even though I was wearing heavy gloves. I managed to shoot 20 or so images before deciding to bail. I simply wasn’t dressed for Lake Michigan in January with a nice breeze rolling in off the frigid water.

By the way, did I mention it was freezing? The readout in the rental car said it was 32 degrees, but after 30 minutes my hands were aching from the cold, even though I was wearing heavy gloves. I managed to shoot 20 or so images before deciding to bail. I simply wasn’t dressed for Lake Michigan in January with a nice breeze rolling in off the frigid water.

When I got back to the hotel, I took a look at the results of my little excursion and decided that the decent shots definitely needed post processing so I turned to Photoshop, and Google’s NIK filter collection. If you haven’t grabbed these filters, you should. They’re free, they’re powerful, and you can spend hours playing with the settings and combinations to get some solid results. For my shots, I did a simple two-step process involving a total of four filters.

Pass one, involved NIK Color FX where I added a graduated Neutral Density filter, Detail extractor, Lens Vignette. All applied very slightly to the image. Pass Two, NIK Silver FX for black and white conversion. I used the Modern Presets for High Dynamic Smooth and then dialed everything way down. While the presets are fun, in typical fashion, they are usually cranked up for maximum effect and can seem really fake when used as is.

I did all the post work on the flight back to Kansas City. Everything was processed from RAW files that were shot on my Olympus OMD EM1 with the 12 to 40mm Pro lens in Low ISO mode.