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Friday Slide Show: Twin Peaks in Fog
13 August 2021
We don't usually hike up Twin Peaks on a cold and foggy day. And we don't bike up either. We wouldn't even bother to drive up, come to think of it.
The tourist buses and yellow GoCars we did see drive up as we climbed the hill didn't even bother to park at the top. There was nothing to see. Just white. The fog obscuring even itself.
You might think that makes for lousy photography but it actually diffused the light rather glamorously. You can see things that are normally too hard to make out in the glaring contrast of bright sunlight.
Which is why we made the trek last weekend.
So we found it interesting. But early on we thought what was interesting was the tonalities before us. Not, that is, the colors tinted by the fog.
We had the impression these would make gorgeous black-and-white images.
We wuz wrong.
The first problem was the fog itself. Bright at that elevation, it was featureless. Leaving it in color, it retained some interest, some character. And the darker parts of the image were more readable than they were in black-and-white.
Not that we didn't try. A quick conversion immediately dissuaded us from spending the afternoon on it. But we couldn't help trying some tricks with the Nik Collection.
But there's a certain harmony to this set in color that's lost in tweaking the black-and-whites individually.
And part of that harmony is tied together with the spray paint graffiti on the barriers where skateboarders practice their moves.
Another aspect of it was the discrepancy between close-ups and long shots. At first we were concerned that the less obscured close-ups would look out of place. Instead they seemed to ground the series. They aren't high contrast so they can't be confused with sunlit shots. But there's no wisp of fog artificially blurring the detail either.
That's the thing about fog. It's nice diffused light up close but so desolate looking down the road into oblivion.
To say nothing of the wind.
