Posts in Category: mist
Fall Fog, Fall Color: Happy Sunday!
Yesterday was one of those rainy, misty, foggy late fall days, when everything is wet, and the last colors of the season excel in depth, rather than brilliance. It brings out the colors of oak and elm and understory shrubs much better than a sunny day could, while the fog softens distance and keeps your eye in close.
Once the rain had stopped, I got out for a loop on the trail at the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge headquarters down the road, just into Wells. I got there between banks of heavy fog, when the conditions were just right to capture the mood of the day.
Everything was still dripping wet, and any color burned against the foggy background.
With the fog-bound focus of my vision, details dominated, and foregrounds became the focus.
The maples with their sunlit brilliance had had their day…now the understory and oaks held sway.
I was experimenting with the Vivid setting on the Canon SX50HS, and, for this kind of day, it was perfect. It gave just enough extra emphasis to the colors so that I could produce an accurate visual effect in Lightroom…or maybe just do so with less processing.
All shots Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast. Vivid Color Space. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, with my hyper-real preset.
And for the Sunday Thought. Of course when fall comes we miss the high bright days of summer. Even in fall, the days we generally treasure, in New England, are the days of wide vistas, bright sun, blue skies with puffy white clouds, and the brilliant reds and oranges and yellows of the Maples. But a day like yesterday teaches that there is a different beauty in the fogs of later fall. There are fewer and less brilliant colors, but every color deepens and draws the eye, and smaller and more subtle details take on life.
It is good to remember that the same thing can happen in the spirit. We treasure the peek experiences…the days of wonderful light and high spiritual skies when we see the brilliance of truth spread round us as bright as autumn Maples. But there is something to be said for those days when a spiritual fog softens and deepens the light…forces us to look close and look deep, to see the patterns of truth and beauty in the foreground of our lives.
Those are good days too. I expect we just have to find our own “vivid” setting…which I suspect must be there, somewhere in our spiritual menus, for just such days. I found mine yesterday. I only hope I remember where it is the next time the fog rolls in.
White River (really)
On the way out from Seattle to Mt Rainier National Park and Sunrise, I drove for miles along the White River. There were precious few spots where it was safe to stop for a view of the river, but there were pull-outs at both ends of Federation Forest State Park. This shot looks vaguely east toward Chinook Pass.
The “white” in White River, and the odd look to the river in the image, comes from fine particles of clay suspended in the rushing water. It makes a difference from the tannin tea colored brook waters and crystal clear mountain streams of the east (and the Rockies for that matter).
There was no avoiding the haze in the air, which solidified almost to mist over the darker trees up river, but it is still, as I see it, a wonderful mountain scene.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 58mm equivalent field of view. f4.5 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. I also used a Graduated Filter Effect from the top to increase clarity in the mountains slightly.
3/14/2012: Champlain Blue, Burlington VT
My wife, daughter number 5, and I took a brief overnighter to Burlington Vermont to visit daughter number 3, who attends Burlington College. By the time we got there the weather had closed in, but we still spent a few hours walking along the shore of Lake Champlain. The Adirondacks across the water were faded to blue on blue, or grey on grey, but the light was soft and lovely, and I had fun playing with simplified compositions.
Canon SX40HS at 84mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 100. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Lightroom 4 has changed many of the develop tools I used every day, and I am having to relearn to get the same effects.
1/29/2012: Space Coast Sunrise. Happy Sunday!
Florida sunrises can be spectacular, and none more-so than those along what they call the Space Coast. I am staying in Titusville, about 5 miles inland from Merritt Island and the Canaveral shore: Cape Canaveral, now the Kennedy Space Center, is between me and the coast. What you see here though, looking like a shadowy landscape of hills against the rising sun, is actually layers of fog over trees. This was taken from the balcony in front of my room, from a higher angle…I had to lean out over railing and zoom in to avoid the building itself. Interstate 95 is right behind the silhouetted palms.
I like the mystery of the shot, the half light and the fog, the bold silhouettes of the palms and the blazing sky.
Canon SX40HS at about 135mm equivalent field of view, f4.5 @ 1/80th @ ISO 200. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly at the top for composition and interest.
And for the Sunday thought: dawn and fog. Obscurity with a promise of clarity and light to come. Now if that does not describe our spiritual journey many days I don’t know what does. As Paul says, “now we see as in a mirror darkly” but we have the promise of full sight and true vision to come. And for me part of the miracle is that even in our obscurity, we are able to see the beauty that calls us. We treasure the dawns, we rejoice in the days, we celebrate the sunsets, we bask in the night and our dreams, to rise again to the promise of the coming day. If this, this life, this glorious life and this beautiful world is “in a mirror darkly” then I can barely imagine what the full light of day will reveal. And no…I am not ignorant of the pain and frustration, the ugliness and decay, that is also obscured by the morning fog of our current days (I95 and its traffic of commerce and greed is right behind the palms)…but I see, in the light of the promise, no reason to dwell on it…to dwell in it. It is beauty that calls me…beauty, truth, light, and I move toward it as surely as the sun rises, as the fog dispels, as day comes. I can, almost always, celebrate the fog of dawn in the rising sun. And that, thank God, is also a good description of my spiritual journey.
10/2/2010: Peat bog!
Saco Heath is one of my favorite photographic destinations in Southern Maine. I have used several images from there as Pic of the Days and I have a gallery on Wide Eyed In Wonder dedicated to it. Saco Heath is a remnant peat bog…the southern-most in Maine, and, as such, provides a sample of an environment that I would otherwise not have access to.
While at Quoddy Head State Park last Saturday, I visited their peat bog…tiny compared to Saco Heath, but totally, awesomely alive. It is obvious, having seen the bog at Quoddy Head, how the bog at Saco Heath struggles for survival. Even in the fog, and even as fall comes on, the Quoddy bog is vibrant and beautiful. At a guess I would say there are more pitcher plants in a 3 yard square of Quoddy than there are in all of Saco. And the variety of mosses and lichens and stunted trees is simply amazing. Truly a beautiful little gem of a bog!
For today I preset the bog in the wide view. Tomorrow you will see some of the detail. The top shot shows a section where the moss still rules, and the second shot, from the back edge of the bog, shows how the trees have pushed out into the bog, where they live a life in miniature. The fog, in both cases, and imho, only adds to the atmosphere of the place.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. Both at f4.0 @ 1/100th @ ISO 80 and Landscape program.
Recovery in Lightroom for the overexposed fog, some Fill Light and Blackpoint right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset. Since the fog in the distance was completely white and somewhat distracting, I used a Graduated Filter effect on both images to darken the sky, which had the added benefit of making the fog more transparent.
9/30/2010: Fog on the Cliffs of Quoddy Head
Fog is difficult to photograph, since the scattered light within the fog itself makes it photographically bright, though it has the opposite effect to the natural eye. A bank of fog almost always comes out as a white indistinct mass in an image. If you expose for the fog, to keep it natural, then the landscape under it goes dark and muddy. Seems like an ideal situation for HDR…kind of. I tried several shots on the cliffs of Quoddy Head to test the effect. As always with HDR, I’d have done better with a tripod…especially as the base exposures all had show shutter speeds due to the overall low level of the light. I did get a few shots that worked though, like the one above.
A secondary problem, if you go the HDR route, is Photomatix’s inability to blend exposures where fine detail masks an open sky…trees against the sky are particularly difficult for the app…and you almost always get a light halo around limbs and leaves where the lighter exposure shows through. Changing the smoothing setting can help in making this less obvious but in this image it still shows somewhat in the trees in the upper right.
The other way to work the fog is to use Revovery and Fill Light in Lightroom, along with some filter trickery. This shot is not HDR, but I was able to extend the range and keep the fog semi-transparent, by using heavy Recovery, which reduces the highlights in an image without effecting the rest of the tones. Fill Light for the foreground allows me to move the Blackpoint right to increase color depth and contrast. Finally, in this case, the fog in the upper left corner was totally blown out and distractingly white…so I went in with a Local Adjustment Brush, set large with maximum feather, and brushed in an adjustment area in that corner. I used to to reduce exposure and brightness selectively there, producing a more natural grey where it was white. If the area had not been so oddly shaped I would have just used a Graduated Filter Effect pulled down from that corner, but LAB worked better for this image.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent.
From Quoddy Head and Lubec ME.
9/29/2010: Birch
Birch bark has always fascinated me. As a boy I kept a collection one summer, of the best scraps I had found, pretending, if memory serves me right, that they represented some kind of wealth. This snippet is from a foggy morning at Quoddy Head State park, and you can see the moisture saturating the bark…in both the natural and the photographic sense. Backing away a bit…and a bit further
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You can see that even at these moderate distances you begin to see the effect of the fog…though it does not diminish the beauty of the birch.
Canon SX20IS at 1) 400mm equivalent @ f5.0 @ 1/30th @ ISO 200, 2) 170mm equivalent @ f4.5 @ 1/50th @ ISO 200, both in Landscape Program, and 3) 28mm equivalent @ f2.8 @ 1/125th @ ISO 160, Programmed Auto.
In Lightroom, a small amount of Recovery, some Fill Light and Blackpoint right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset.
From Quoddy Head and Lubec ME.
9/28/2010: Quoddy Head Forest
The forest at Quoddy Head is a typical northern coastal forest…full of moss and lichen…and, on my visit, made even more mysterious by the fog. I love this kind of landscape, but experience has proven that it is very hard to capture what I see there in an image. This one comes close. And so does this.
Both Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. 1) F2.8 @ 1/30th @ ISO 100. 2) three exposure HDR using auto bracket.
In Lightroom, some Recovery for the fog, a bit of Fill Light and Blackpoint right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset. Processing of #1 was more extreme than #2 as I was working from a single exposure.
9/27/2010: Quoddy Head Light
Quoddy Head Light, while not, perhaps, one of the more attractive Lighthouse in Maine, has the distinction of being the eastern-most Lighthouse in the United States, standing on the eastern-most point of land in the United States. It is so far east that my cell phone claimed it was in another time zone.
The other thing that distinguishes Quoddy Head is fog. Beside the light is the fog horn, and it goes part or all of most days. Certainly, while I had hopes according the National Weather Service, it never stopped sounding during my visit, and the fog never lifted more than a few feet off the ground. Maybe the NWS is not in charge of the weather in that time zone?
Still, you can’t visit Quoddy Head without photographing the Light, fog or no fog…so…
Though I tried this shot as an HDR, hoping for better light on the Lighthouse, I like this single shot version better, as I was able to maintain, and even emphasize, detail in the foreground grass…maybe I would have done better with the HDR with a tripod.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent, f2.8 @ 1/640th @ ISO 125. Programmed auto.
In Lightroom, recovery for the fog, Blackpoint right, added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset. Then I pulled a Graduated Filter effect up from the bottom to increase brightness, contrast, and clarity on the lawn (to bring up the fine details) and one down from the top to darken just a bit, increase contrast considerably, and add a bit of saturation. Finally, I used the vertical distortion control to straighten the house and Light.
And here it is from the other side:
9/26/2010: Orange River Marsh
Happy Sunday!
I am in Machias Maine this morning, having brought daughter #4 up to visit daughter #3 at college on Home Coming weekend. Yesterday, despite heavy fog over the coast, I drove up to Quoddy Head State Park to explore and to see what I could find to photograph. On the way up, while still on Route 1, I passed an Atlantic Coast Conservancy pull off for Reynolds Marsh, and a few seconds later crossed the marsh (or river…it is the Orange River) itself. It looked so promising that I had to turn around and go back.
It was actually raining lightly when I got out of the car, and I had to work with one hand covering the controls of the camera all the time, and trust to my lens shade to keep water off the lens. There was a short walk down through the woods to the marsh, and I no more than stepped beneath trees than two Ruffed Grouse shot up in front of me and beat away among the spruce. The trail led to a canoe launch on the edge of the marsh.
The challenge with fog is getting enough light on the foreground so it looks natural without turning the fog into a bright white nimbus that blanks out the top 2/3rs of the image. And of course it is the contrast between the saturated wet colors close by, particularly rich in the diffuse light, and the grey encroaching atmosphere, that makes a foggy morning so interesting photographically.
I tried a few three exposure HDRs, and I am pretty happy with the results. I find that, using Photomtix for the HDRs, I still have to envision what I will be able to do with the image in Lightroom, and adjust the tone mapping in Photomatix with that in mind.
Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. Three exposures separated by 2EV with the center of the range moved down –2/3EV using exposure compensation. ISO 125.
Photomatix tone-mapping, and then a bit more Recovery in Lightroom, some Fill Light, and the Blackpoint moved right…added Clarity and Vibrance, and Sharpen narrow edges preset.
And, being Sunday, I think about the parable potential of the image as well…
The fog that obscures the distance (future?), should not lessen your enjoyment of the rich saturated colors of your life close at hand…and, in fact, the contrast is, often, what makes life interesting. Or so say I.
One more from the foggy marsh. This one is not an HDR, but I was able to balance the exposure using Recovery and Fill Light in Lightroom. Taken in wide (16/9) mode.
