Several blog posts ago I mentioned that I come across places that I like but don’t know how to photograph and I keep these places in mind and try to come back to them with new ideas. One such place is a patch of ashe juniper trees with a hiking trail leading through it. This place is at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge and not too terribly far from my house. I have been through this grove of trees several times and have never gotten a good photo and I always thought that I’d like to see it in fog, so that has been sitting in the back of my mind for a few years now.

Thursday morning I planned to get up and maybe head out to the lake and shoot wildlife. But as I looked outside in the morning I saw thick fog and mist. So, I changed my plans and decided to head to this patch of woods instead. The roads were wet and it rained off-and-on the way out there, but I have a rain jacket so I continued on. When I got there, the parking lot was empty as I was clearly the only one foolish enough to come out on a rainy foggy morning. I put on my rain jacket, grabbed my backpack and headed down to the grove of trees. Luckily for me, there was only a slight rain which didn’t impede my photography.

I got in amongst the trees and tried to figure out where to set up. I wanted enough of the trees but I also wanted the fog in the distance to show. I also wanted the trail to lead into the photo, but it takes a bit of a curve as it heads out of the trees. So, I set up in the middle of the grove and did my best to center the trail and frame it with trees. I’m not sure the fog was quite thick enough to give me the effect I wanted, but I gave it a few shots. See my best landscape oriented shot below.

Ordinarily shooting here would give you a very contrasted image of harsh shadows and excessively bright sky. But the fog and thick clouds really soften the scene up. This scene is also very rich in mid-winter browns and muted greens and I wasn’t sure how well that would work, but I think I like the way the colors turned out. Oh, and the image is perfectly level, but the hillside is not.

I did really want the texture of the tree bark to show so I actually took several series of bracketed exposures (5 each) and merged them using Lightroom. This allowed me to get a lot less noise in the darker areas without over-exposing the brighter areas. There was not enough wind to even make a leaf quiver so that wasn’t an issue. After merging, I did mask the brighter areas in the distance and reduce the dehaze and exposure to make the fog a bit more gloomy.

Below is my vertical shot close to the edge of the wood to get more of the orange-brown grasses in the fog. I really struggled with framing the trees on the edges of the photo.

After this I decided to hike up the ridge to see what it looked like from an overlook and it looked a lot like the inside of a cloud. So, I hiked back and it started to rain. I threw my rain jacket over my shoulders and backpack and made it back to the truck without getting too wet.

I shot everything here with just a 35mm prime lens as that is what I was in the mood for. Sometimes it is nice to just focus on a certain focal length instead of a zoom and I like the 35mm focal length. With a zoom it is easy to just turn the dial and take a lot of random shots whereas shooting with a prime makes you think more about your position and framing. It also helps make all your photos look like they go together as they all have the same sort of perspective.

Below is a picture of a dead tree that I took a few days before at refuge using the same camera and lens. For some reason I really like to shoot a dead tree against the sky and the sky was colorful and interesting on this afternoon. I walk by this dead tree every time I go hiking out here and think about shooting it. I perhaps should have paid more attention to the grass in the foreground, but it’s OK.

We don’t get a lot of foggy mornings around central Texas and the ones we get seldom fall on a morning that I don’t have to work. So, it was really nice to catch one on a day off and be ready to go with a location and a plan. Not sure I got exactly what I envisioned, but it was fun to try. Thanks for reading.