It was a damp and foggy morning. We don’t really get a lot of foggy mornings around here and I have kind of been waiting on one to practice shooting in. The fog can hide what’s in the distance in a photo and leave a little mystery for the viewer or it can simplify a photo allowing you to focus on one subject. I saw fog in the forecast last night, so when I woke up this morning, I looked outside to check and saw that it was quite foggy. So, I grabbed my camera and headed out the door at about 8 AM and walked to the neighborhood park to shoot photos amidst the trees.

Unlike with clear mornings it doesn’t really matter where the sun is when shooting in the fog. The clouds and fog are very thick, the lighting is completely diffuse, there are almost no shadows, and the colors are very muted. The muted landscape colors really make this blue park bench stand out amidst the grays. I did also desaturate the earth tones in the photos a bit to enhance the gray mood of the photos.

It was so foggy out that I walked right by this heron without noticing until I turned around to look at the pond. This is a very large bird that seems to live in this park year round. It must be finding plenty to eat in the ponds and streams judging by its size.

I noticed one of the leafless trees was isolated by the fog and I thought that it might make a nice photo. Ordinarily the stand of oaks in the background would clutter this picture up, but the thick fog allowed me to focus on mostly just the tree. I squatted nearly to the ground to get this photo with the branches above the landscape. And I, again, muted the earth tones in post to put the tree more in focus. My attempt at a minimalist, lonely composition.

The fog also let me photograph these trees reflecting in the pond without all of the houses in the background. Some of the oaks keep their leaves all winter long and shed them in the spring as they are growing new leaves. This can cause a problem if we get an ice storm as the weight of the ice on the leaves snaps the branches, but that hasn’t happened in several years around here. I do have a live oak in my yard and I make sure that it doesn’t have branches overhanging the house in case this happens.

The fog can also make pictures look a little spooky. I took this photo in a walkway under a street bridge. On the sidewalk in the distance there are a couple of people out for their morning walk, but they are shrouded by fog and look perhaps a bit suspicious from the viewer’s standpoint hiding in the concrete tunnel. I kind of wish the person wasn’t walking a dog as that makes them seem harmless.

I considered making these photos black-and-white as the color does not add much to the composition, but I am very black-and-white averse when it comes to photos. I feel like color, even if it is very desaturated still adds to the story of the photo. So, that’s what I did here; with each photo I reduced the global color saturation to what you see here. The earth tones are still there, but I think that their reduced saturation adds to the feel of the fog in the photos in a way that would lost if it were straight black-and-white. If I were shooting something that was all about a particular texture, I suppose black-and-white might create a better focus on that subject.

My clothes got damp and my shoes got kind of muddy, but that was my Sunday morning walk in the fog. Thanks for reading.