© Brad Mangas

As I was walking downstairs to my office/work area/desk this morning, I looked at a picture I have printed and framed at the bottom of the the stairs. Before you wonder, this image here is not it. Maybe I will try to post that one tomorrow. But seeing that image reminded me of taking the shot and a few others from around that same time period. The winter of 2007 I spent a good deal of time out at a local lake, Lake Shawnee playing and experimenting with winter lake type of shots. That year didn’t necassarily produce lots of frozen areas at times but what I did find were some nice spots for late afternoon and sunset shot from the east side of the lake. It’s amazing the difference the seasons make on whether a sunset shot will work or not just from the position of the sun in the sky at that time of year. This is a post sunset shot taken mainly for the clouds and southern flying geese that helped fill the winter sky.

For this shot I had no plan for black and white conversion so it has set in my archives for a few years since I just could never get it to a point where I was happy with it. Colors seemed a little odd for some reason.  So having seen the image this morning at the bottom of my stairs reminded me to go and revisit some of those shots and maybe try some new processing techniques on them. Initially the thought was to see how they could be handled in Topaz Adjust or Topaz Detail. This is a result of using Detail as a black & white conversion tool. I have been quite pleased with the level of control with the new Topaz Detail 2 plugin. Color or black & white gives you many adjustment sliders to help achieve a look you like.