Fog on the Bay

Fog can be a very fun and useful tool for photography. It can help simplify an image by obscuring the background, which helps your subject stand out. It can remove color from a scene, enabling you to focus on the shapes. It can add mystery to your image inviting the viewer to imagine what is being hidden. And the fog can give a scene a mood that it wouldn’t ordinarily have and lead to a compelling image. So, landscape photographers can get a bit excited about foggy conditions as long as it isn’t dense fog.

I don’t get a lot of fog where I live, but I was down at the coast last weekend and it was foggy and misty on the afternoon that I arrived and the forecast called for fog in the morning. Thinking about the fog as I drove around, I took note of a few places that might look good and planned to return once I got settled in. I don’t have a lot of experience shooting in fog, so the photos in this post are my experiments. The images will gradually shift from very little color on the first afternoon, to warm pastels by dawn on my last day there.

A pelican with the diagonal lines of a fishing pier

When I stood in the light rain taking the image below, I thought the pier made a compelling image against the foggy distance. The white rails and that one white plank really stand out agains the weathered wood. The calm water and obscured horizon perhaps gives a sense of foreboding to the lonely pier. The fishing pier itself is a rather mundane subject but this image is as much about what you can’t see as what you can.

The next images I took from a sandy fishing jetty near a causeway on a foggy morning. The seagulls perched on the remnants of an old pier patiently waiting for the fog to lift I suppose. I thought it made for a nice silhouette so I pushed the blacks down and the whites up. As an aside, it is very difficult to get all of the seagulls to behave and look the same direction at the same time.

The sun was eventually able to start piercing the fog as it rose above the horizon. I enjoyed the way the fog spread out the colors from the sun. I also wanted to smooth out the water to give it a softer ethereal appearance so I put on a neutral density filter. I couldn’t center the sun in the image, but I don’t think I needed to. If you look closely at the bottom of the image you can see the shells beneath the shallow water.

As the sunrise warmed up the mist, I saw pelicans flying low across the water. They were nice enough to synchronize their wing flapping for me to give me a nice silhouette against the orange mist. There is a “rule of three” that would state that I need a third pelican in this photo but there were only two flying by. I’ll happily take what I got without too much complaining about that I suppose.

Finally, as I was wrapping up shooting I saw the causeway behind me disappearing into the fog. I couldn’t believe I had ignored it for all that time. There it was in a scene lit up in beautiful soft pastels with the curve of the bridge fading into the fog. I did have to wait until the few cars had gone to get the shot I wanted. This may be my favorite photo of the entire trip down to the coast. Don’t you wonder where that bridge is leading?

These photos were all taken at Aransas Bay on the Texas coast on a foggy evening and a foggy morning. I went down there to shoot wildlife photography, and I did, but these foggy conditions brought me an unexpected joy. I think these photos capture the mood of the coast on this weekend and I couldn’t help but go through and edit them first. Thanks for reading.

26 thoughts on “Fog on the Bay”

  3. Nice shots. My favorite is the color photo of the rising sun over the spiles. They look like they’re floating in air. The pelicans flying through the golden air also impresses me. But they’re all very interesting and beautiful photos, in my view. I’ll think of fog a little differently the next time I’m in it, with my camera handy. But does it count if my brain is always in a fog?

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  4. These photographs are amazing, you should be proud! You even got my seagull friends in your pics. LOL about them not all facing the same direction for you. Guess you need to work on speaking seagull language.
    Yes your last photograph of the bridge does make me wonder. I think these photographs are definitely worthy of a story perhaps. They bring much more beauty than the fog that was here last week and that I had to drive in. I wasn’t as appreciative of the fog then.

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