{"id":1695,"date":"2010-09-30T07:14:15","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sipotd.wordpress.com\/2010\/09\/30\/9302010-fog-on-the-cliffs-of-quoddy-head\/"},"modified":"2010-09-30T07:14:15","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T12:14:15","slug":"9302010-fog-on-the-cliffs-of-quoddy-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/psnp.info\/p4td_\/?p=1695","title":{"rendered":"9\/30\/2010: Fog on the Cliffs of Quoddy Head"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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\u2026kind of. I tried several shots on the cliffs of Quoddy Head to test the effect. As always with HDR, I\u2019d have done better with a tripod\u2026especially 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.<\/p>\n

A secondary problem, if you go the HDR route, is Photomatix\u2019s inability to blend exposures where fine detail masks an open sky\u2026trees against the sky are particularly difficult for the app\u2026and you almost always get a light halo around limbs and leaves where the lighter exposure shows through<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2026so 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.<\/p>\n

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Canon SX20IS at 28mm equivalent. <\/p>\n

From Quoddy Head and Lubec ME. <\/p>\n

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