Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Friday Slide Show: The Morning Fog
30 June 2023
It's been cold here for a while now. Low fifties. The weather reporters have all been saying it's going to get warmer and really warm by the end of the week. They make it sound like a disaster is coming, of course. That's their job. Get out your Heat Wave Survival Kits in case the electricity goes out and you have no water.
But on the coast, a heat wave just means the fog will be thick.*
And, sure enough, on Thursday, with the temperature at 52 degrees and the heater on, we awoke to a thick fog. We could barely see across the street.
So we grabbed the Nikon D200 with its 18-200mm Nikkor and took a walk around the neighborhood before 7 a.m.
We thought we might see a coyote loping home for the day but no such luck. We barely saw another human being. And just a few cars, headlights on to futilely try to slash through the fog. It's fog lights you need for that.
The morning fog may chill the air...
We left the Nikkor set at f8, consciously not narrowing our focus plane to let the fog do that work. But we kicked ISO up to 400 to get a reasonable shutter speed. We quickly realized it was more effective to have something near and something far in the scene so you could see the effect of the fog.
It was darker toward the west and lighter toward the east where, presumably, the sun had risen. And our color temperature seemed to shift quite a bit, too, which we tried to control in editing.
Otherwise, not much editing. We didn't try to sharpen these or throw some Dehaze at them. Counterproductive.
We had thought, as we loped around ourselves, that this should be a black-and-white slide show. But it turned out the color was illuminating. The neon, the traffic lights, the flora (which close-up avoided the veiling effect of the fog).
It was also pretty wet. The streets were wet. The parked cars all looked like they'd just been hosed off. And our lens hood acquired some condensation on top that our warmer camera and lens avoided, thankfully.
And as an added bonus, we picked up a nice 1.3 mile hike to start the day.
The morning fog may chill the air, as the song goes, but we don't care. We're used to a little ambiguity.
