Winter on Lake Superior (January 2023 Trip)

I recently returned from a photo trip with a friend (Josh Steele - go check out his work!) up to the shoreline of Lake Superior for a few days. I enjoy the look on the faces of most people when I tell them I’m heading further north in the middle of winter to point my camera at things. Most of them view the areas of northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan as summer destinations, but over the last few years I’ve come to believe winter is the best time to visit for landscape photography. The combination of wind and waves coming off the lake can create some really interesting ice formations, everything is beautifully snow covered, sunrise and sunset are at reasonable times of the day, and the hoards of visitors and tourists in the area throughout the rest of the year are nowhere to be found. If you layer up your clothes, invest in a solid pair of crampons and snowshoes, and make the effort to get out there and brave the conditions, there are so many great scenes to be found.

For this trip, we mostly ended up going back to a few locations that we’d checked out previously. Even from day to day the ice formations along the shoreline changed dramatically as the waves would pick up and settle back down causing the ice formations to melt and refreeze, so we were always able to find new compositions that we hadn’t shot before. The weather forecast going into the weekend was looking a little too warm and very cloudy, and I was expecting most of my shots from sunrise and sunset to turn out like the first image below, with very little color in the sky and a moody feeling as the storms rolled through. Luckily, the temperatures stayed just low enough for the ice to stick around, and we ended up managing to get an interesting sunrise and sunset for three of the four locations we visited! Just goes to show, it’s always worth getting out and just seeing what happens.

Overall I feel like this was a pretty successful trip, and hopefully you enjoy these images as much as I enjoyed creating them!