The first week that I fully committed to manual control of my camera, I started the week by shooting our backyard trees from the second story on a foggy morning and ended the week by walking in a nearby state park at dawn through yet more fog.
I was suddenly hypersensitive to light given that I wasn’t letting the camera control ISO, aperture and shutter speed. I was seeing more closely, in a more alive way. And the fog felt like an ally, determined to make shots that would have been dull at noon in the summer seem full of intrigue and complexity. For most of the rest of that year, any time I saw a forecast of fog, I’d be out of bed before the sunrise, off to shoot somewhere.
I grew up with regular fogs rolling in off the Pacific, almost daily at some times of the year. They were surface-level clouds: walking through them as they arrived was visually similar to looking out the window in an airplane as it crosses a cloud layer. Along the coast, at some point, the fog would lift and stay up in the coastal hills a bit longer, then burn off as the sun took hold of the sky. Then sometimes another fog bank would roll in late in the afternoon or the early evening.
Mist and fog in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic is a much rarer and more unpredictable event. The most common cause is what you see in this photo, which is a warmer rain coming in on top of very cold or frozen ground overnight with the rain stopping just before dawn, maybe melting off a bit of remnant snow. (It generally doesn’t happen if there’s still a fair amount of snow cover left on the ground despite the rain—the snow cover tends to just turn the rain to ice.) But mist is sometimes just an almost-rain, or sometimes just happens for reasons that I’m sure atmospheric scientists could explain but that I can’t connect in a more intuitive way to existing conditions. (Though I will say that the forecasters around here are sometimes themselves surprised by morning fog.) Evening fog seems extraordinarily rare in the mid-Atlantic by contrast.
The nature of mist and fog around here is different than those Pacific fog banks—more mercurial, less like a cloud. It’s a surrounding thing that adheres strangely to spaces. It has a shifting gradient. Often times it doesn’t move towards a horizon or up a slope but instead seems to retreat bit by bit into the forests, into darker places, to fold in on itself. Getting up to photograph in a predicted morning fog is a bit like going out to see a meteor shower—an unpredictable commitment that may disappoint, may become uncomfortable (say, if the mist gives way to rain, as it sometimes does), may lose some of its magic as the light grows brighter but the fog does not lift.
The morning I took this shot, I was disappointed by most of the other photos I got, but this one seemed just right somehow. The others on this walk up to the main administrative building on campus didn’t work because there were no people in them, because one person was too close to me and became too clear, because the fog lifted or deepened momentarily at the wrong moment. Not for the first or the last time, I felt more like a bystander than a creator of an image that I meant to produce.
The one fog goal I have now is to try shooting in a nearby commercial downtown in a dawn fog—I feel as if street lights and long-exposure cars in motion might be far more interesting in the mist than they are otherwise. That takes setting my alarm and finding some energy the next time I see a fog forecast, which is a harder ask than it used to be.