Happy Sunday! I am in California for a few days, doing a Point and Shoot for Wildlife workshop at Sea and Sage Audubon, so I spent the morning on Friday exploring likely places for shooting at San Joaquin Wildlife Sanctuary, where Sea and Sage are headquartered. San Joaquin is one of those rare city bound NWRs, sitting between Irvine, Costa Mesa, and Laguna Beach. You can see the city around you from any point on the refuge.

San Joaquin is also well under the Marine Layer in the morning, so most of my explore was done in light fog under a completely featureless overcast (denser fog). To say that the light was well filtered is understatement. The light was as near to non-directional as is possible in nature. (The environmental image above was taken near noon, when the Marine Layer had finally burned off.) This is less than ideal when shooting birds at a distance, and near disaster when shooting against the sky, but for big white birds on the ground and fairly close it is actually pretty much ideal. This soft light is the only kind of light that really brings out the more subtle modeling in an Egret while maintaining a natural look to the surroundings.

Nikon Coolpix P300 behind the Vario eyepiece on a ZEISS DiaScope 65FL for the equivalent field of view of a 1400mm lens on a full frame DSLR. 1/800th @ ISO 160. f4.5 effective (limited by the camera). Program.

Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.

(Environmental shot at 24mm on the Canon SX40HS.)

And for the Sunday thought: we sometimes think life would be better if all the days were sunny…Southern California sunny…but even living in paradise, it can take a day of foggy air and and soft, filtered light to being out the more subtle details that we might otherwise miss. True for the photographer who is perhaps hypersensitive to the light…and true for anyone with eyes. True in what passes for normal life, and true in the life of the spirit.  Sometimes it takes those spiritual fogs…those spiritual Marine Layers closing the spiritual sky and filtering the light…to let us see the more subtle details close to us.