This shot came from a late October walk along the shore of Lake Michigan near South Haven in the southwest part of Michigan. It was a really windy and brisk day, mostly sunny with lots of nice white clouds moving quickly by. The edge of Lake Michigan was about 20-30 feet behind me as I took this shot, so this is just off the beach.
The full color version of this photo is fine, but due to the blue sky and white clouds I thought I could get a nice black and white image out of it.
I used Lightroom 3 and Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 for the processing here. Optimized the color image in LR3 first, moved to SEP2 for the B&W conversion, then back to LR3 for final tweaks and a slight copperish toning in the shadows, which has a subtle warming effect. I used a yellow/orange filter in SEP2 to get the darkest part of the blue sky very close to black, and also boosted the overall contrast/structure a bit.
