I missed a foggy morning here over New Year’s—by the time I was awake and realized it was foggy, it was too late to really get out and about with the camera.
Winter fog and the dense deciduous woods found the east of North America make for really compelling photographs. Fog diffuses light and creates softer, more mysterious shadows.
It’s a lot harder to forecast out than in the U.S. west, on the other hand. When I was growing up in California, you could see fog out over the Pacific, and be pretty sure about the weather conditions that would bring it in for a while, sometimes in puffs and waves. I never wondered what it was like inside a cloud: that’s exactly what those fog banks were, ground-level clouds.
Fog out here in the mid-Atlantic comes from all sorts of things: particular kinds of rain (never predictably so), from snow cover sublimating rapidly on a warming day, or sometimes just when you go from very cold bare ground to rapid heating in a single day. Usually it doesn’t last very long if the sun is going to be up without a high cloud layer (and if there’s thick rainclouds over head, you usually don’t get fog. So it is also here a great example of the fragile opportunities that unpredictable conditions provide to a photographer: no foggy day is the same thing twice, and you’re never sure when it’s coming.
We talk a lot about work-life balance these days, and about how many jobs up and down the income spectrum are hollowing out our chances to be human. One thing I know I’d always want a good society to leave room for is not just regular scheduled leisure but also impulse and serendipity. I once had a great student who I knew was extremely interested in birds (not just as a hobbyist but as a budding researcher). One day he asked me if it was ok if he missed tomorrow’s history class because there was an offshore hurricane moving up the Atlantic seaboard and he wanted to go to the Delaware coast to see the pelagic bird species that would come in from the open ocean to shelter from the storm. I thought that was such a perfect thing to ask that had I known he was harboring such a thought I would have commanded he do it rather than come to class.
Amidst the forest is a really effective way to photograph the fog. I love fog, entirely because it always reminds me of Sacramento, where I'm from. But I don't think I've taken any good pictures of fog; by the time I got interested in photography I was no longer living there.