Tuesday, December 17, 2024,
There are certain weather conditions that I really like when it comes to photography. Clouds and fog are among the top of that list, so when the weather forecast looks like that I start thinking about places that I can go to take advantage of it. That was the case yesterday, but I had other commitments that involved delivering prints to a client which will always take precedence over getting new photos for my own portfolio. When I got home and started to pay attention to the weather again, it looked like there was going to be a repeat of the weather again the following morning. My mind started racing about what I could photograph. The only potential roadblock that I might run into was doing a mentorship session with a client. I had spoken with him earlier and said that I would be able to do a session any time on Tuesday because I didn’t have much of anything going on until the evening.
I didn’t hear back from my client about the session and decided that I would go ahead and plan to go out in the morning after Toni left for her new job. I had a couple of ideas in place about subjects to photograph. Since I have been having so much luck with my decay subjects, I wanted to build on that momentum, but knew that I wanted to stay reasonably close to home so that I could make use of the short timeframe that the fog was supposed to be around. I was also wanting to minimize the amount of wet roads that I drove on because the truck was still relatively clean after my mud bogging event last week. Fortunately, I am pretty familiar with the locations to shoot around town.
One of the first places that came to mind was a grown over parking lot off of US 421 that has a few old trucks that I had photographed back in the Spring of 2021. I have visited here off and on since that time in hopes that I would find some new compositions and better light. I have not pulled the camera out again there regrettably and I thought that there was a good chance that the fog might make for a completely different look to the trucks. Another option that I thought about was photographing a Volkswagen that I had shot about three years ago. I had not had good luck with the VW because of where it was situated, but now that I am much more proficient with the long lens, I thought that I might be able to make something work out better than just isolations. The addition of fog would also help to simplify the scene which would give me some more options.
Both of those options were close to the house, like within a 7 mile radius from the garage. If those didn’t pan out, I was still wanting to capture a red barn that is just a couple of miles from home. I tried this the last time we had fog but found a semi truck parked in the way of it. The last time I was down that way, the truck was still there, so I didn’t have much hope for a clear shot. Regardless, it was looking like I was going to be getting out with the camera come morning.
I woke up a little after Toni did and checked the weather. It was showing fog currently, with an advisory in place until 9am. That would give me enough time to work at least one of the locations, and possibly both. Looking out the window didn’t really give me much to go on about the actual conditions because it was still quite dark. I decided that I was ready to get out with the camera again even if the conditions weren’t exactly right, so I went ahead and got myself ready to roll while Toni was finishing getting herself ready. When she left, I had her let me know what the fog was looking like down on 421 since that was my primary location that I wanted to shoot.
She texted me about ten minutes later with a photo of the conditions. There was fog, but it was a higher fog than what I was really looking for. I needed that really soupy fog that was right over the ground, but it didn’t appear that was going to be happening. The same conditions were existing here at the house as well. Knowing that the VW was kind of down in a valley compared to the two locations I was seeing, I felt that the fog wasn’t going to play an active part at all with that car. It was appearing that the fog was just kind of hovering and not really playing an active part in the atmosphere down low to the ground. Essentially, I had a murky overcast day which wasn’t going to work with any of my intended subjects.
I had to step back and reconsider my options at this point. I was up and was still wanting to shoot. The light was good outside, but the fog wasn’t so much a player in the conditions. It would be good for waterfalls, but there was no time to get to one in time to make use of the conditions. The conditions were also good for woodland photography, but again, I hadn’t really planned on traveling to a woodland. As I was looking out of the window, it hit me. I have been contemplating photographing the woods on our property off and on for a while now. I’ve used them in portrait shoots before, and captured a few photos here and there of the property, but I haven’t really gone out in the woods to do woodland photos as of yet. The conditions were good for that right now, and I wouldn’t have to drive anywhere to make it happen. I just needed to put on boots and walk out the door.
Don’t worry, I also remembered to take the camera and tripod with me when I walked outside. I didn’t really know what I wanted to capture because I really didn’t know how things were going to be looking up close and personal. My most successful landscape shoot of the yard had taken place during our first Winter when I stayed on the porch and photographed some scenes through the freezing rain. It was kind of cheating because I didn’t even step foot on the grass, and remained under the shelter the entire time. This time, I was going to be strolling along in the woods getting right up close to my subjects. I had an idea rattling around in my head about finding a lone leaf hanging from a branch which I was thinking would make for an interesting photo. I just had to find an opportunity somewhere in those woods.
It actually didn’t take long at all before I came upon a tree that still had some faded orange leaves attached. I looked all around it to see if I could isolate a small area and place it against a suitable background. There were a pair of leaves that I found which fit that bill and there was an area of the background which was darker than the leaves that I could use. For this, the telephoto lens was the right choice and the one that I fitted. Normally for woodland photography, I would leave the polarizer off, but this time time I wanted to counter the water that was coating everything and giving off a sheen that diluted the colors. I was really feeling the colors of the morning and didn’t want to miss out on any of the saturation that was offered by the wetness that was in the air.
The frames started clicking as I fine tuned the composition, the depth of field, the point of focus, and the timing with the breeze. It was still early in the morning, but I was already feeling like I had something good going on with this first subject. I really liked the blurred background which was made possible by the long lens, but I didn’t shoot with the lens fully opened because I needed to keep the subject mostly in focus for impact. The actual point of focus was changed slightly between frames to allow me a better choice of which one to keep. The plan was only to keep one out of the series since all of the frames were of the same two leaves. The main difference was whether the leaves were at the top of the frame or the bottom.
When I felt good that I had what I wanted with that series of shots, I moved my attention to other areas surrounding that tree. I was looking up and down just waiting for inspiration to hit. What hit me next was a weed that was growing up through the ground ferns. The three leaves were red which contrasted beautifully with the bright green of the ferns. The trick was getting a composition that would organize the scene in a pleasing way. I’m still not sure that I managed to make that happen, but I found something that felt right after a minute or two of fiddling with the position of the camera.
In post, I worked with it even more by darkening the ground cover and desaturating it a bit. This allowed the two elements that I wanted the attention on to jump forward a bit in the scene. It definitely improved the scene, but I’m still not convinced that it works as a photograph. Time will tell if it works or not, but for now, I’m going to include it here in the collection of keepers. This is not a type of photography that I do often, so it is good to experiment with it from time to time.
I eventually moved on from working the floor, and started to find things a little higher up which made for a bit easier of a time separating the elements. One of the first things that jumped out at me was a tree that was shedding its bark. The bark was torn off, yet was still hanging there in a way that reminded me of the feathers on a headdress. There were also little webs linking the bits of bark which added to the visual interest. I worked around this tree until I found an angle that I liked and set the camera up in preparation of getting a photograph.
I started off with the camera in a horizontal orientation which I thought provided a good bit of visual tension with the main subject being off to the left while the blurred background provided a good deal of negative space on the right. As I reviewed the image, I didn’t like all the negative space and thought that it looked a little cheesy. I flipped the camera to the vertical orientation and tried it again. This worked out much better and the visual balance was much stronger this way. Sometimes, the obvious framing is just the right choice, even when you think that it deserves something a little special.
Things were moving along quite nicely at this point. I was getting in the groove of woodland photography once again and found that I wasn’t wasting a lot of frames on each composition now. The fact that this type of photography is a very difficult genre of landscape work was really hitting home with me though. It just isn’t as simple as you would think. There are two distinct steps which require a degree of observation that other photography just doesn’t really have on this scale. The first step is that you find something that stands out from the surroundings. Yes, this is the same with any type of landscape, but when dealing with woodland photography, you are picking out details that might be smaller than your hand in a scene that can be miles deep. The second step is once you find that small bit of interest that sticks out, you have to work your way around it to find a background that will allow it to jump out at the viewer. This could be a contrasting color, or alternating light and dark with the main subject. This is the time when you decide if blur will be needed in the background or not, and if so, how much is needed. Because of how small these scenes are, you can usually photograph them from a full 360 degrees which gives lots of options, but too many options can be worse than not having enough.
One of my favorite photos that I shot from the day is Gaunt, which appears above. I had been walking through one of the trails and spotted a lot of spider webs with the beads of dew on them. I followed the webs back to the trees where I found a grouping of small branches that looked like two hands. The webs appeared to be stretched between the fingers which interested me. I went around this little scene and found an angle that I liked where the background was brighter than the limb which was left in shadow. The structure of the limbs seemed to carry a similar flow that added to the repeating pattern of the fingers. The web seemed to shimmer a bit to add just enough visual interest to pull the viewer in. I chose to keep the depth of field very shallow and I started to fire off some frames. Things were looking fine on the LCD, but I was thinking that this would be a black and white image to help separate the elements more. I was really wishing that the background could be darker than the subject, but with the dark wood, there wasn’t really any way for that contrast to happen.
Or was there….
If I only had a speedlite with me, I could pop a bit of flash from the side and illuminate the branch and web while allowing the background to be underexposed. It would be simple to do, but it would require me going back into the house and getting a flash and transmitter from my portrait kit. I didn’t really want to do all of that, so I thought for a second about what I had available which might work as well. I remembered all those times doing light painting years ago and thought that I might be able to use a flashlight and do just that with the branch. Since I was working with a small subject, and at close distance, I wouldn’t really need much power with the light. The little LED flashlight that I had is great for hiking because it is relatively bright and I figured it would give me just enough light to make things work.
The exposure was dialed into the camera to allow it all to be underexposed. I then let the light shine on the main portion of the branch which made the wood light up perfectly. I even had to reduce the exposure just a bit more to keep the branch from blowing out. I snapped several frames like this with slight changes in the angle of the light. I could tell that things were looking much better with the addition of the extra light. There was no reason to even look at the original shots when I got these into the computer. I just went right for the second set of frames and picked from there. The only thing that had to be done in post was to work on the contrast a bit, and get the color tones right since the branch had been illuminated with a very blue light. The end result had the branch a nice warm tone while the background went into cool shadow. It set the perfect mood that I was after.
Around the same area, I found another tree that had a few remaining leaves much like the tree I had started out photographing about an hour earlier. There were three distinct clumps of leaves that drew my attention. I looked around for the right angle to shoot these from and really couldn’t find one that isolated the leaves well enough. What I ended up doing was backing away from the scene and getting more of the branch in the frame. This created a lot more negative space, but also allowed the branch to start dividing up the scene much like a mosaic painting. The branches gave the structure to the scene while the blurred background gave a cool color palette for the warm leaves to jump from. There was a lot going into this image considering the entire scene was probably only ten inches wide.
As I continued my walk around the property, I started to look for mushrooms and lichen. There were a few trees that had the fungus growing along the trunks, but most were in positions that made them very hard to get to. There was one that wasn’t too far off the trail and I was able to get in close enough to get a clear shot of it. Once again, the name of the game was finding the right angle. In this case, I decided to use a very thin tree in the background that was growing at the same angle to mirror the diagonal that my subject had started. I picked an area that allowed me to include the clump of leaves in the background to help fill the upper corner for a bit of balance. I then blurred the background out so that all we were left with was the shapes that filled the area.
In post, I decided that the green stood out too much in the background because the dominant color in the scene was beige and brown. By removing the color, I was able to change the visual weight of the background leaves in relation to the lichen. The new relationship brought the attention right back to the main subject where I wanted it to be. This was very easy to accomplish by use of tweaking the color channels within the frame. Even when presenting an image in black and white, the color information is still an integral part of the file and can aid in creating contrast, even in black and white.
While looking for lichen, I happened to see one small tree that had something that resembled lichen growing on all of the branches. I’m not sure that is what was actually going on, but they didn’t look like blooms to me. Make no mistake about it, my thumbs are not green and I know very little about this kind of stuff. What I did know was the yellow bits growing on the branch made for a very interesting texture and I wanted to photograph them. As was the case with all of these photos, I started to work my way around the tree until I found the right angle for the right section of branch would work best as a composition. The background was nice and green which helped to make the yellow bits really stand out. I was very happy that I had gained a working knowledge of color theory when I started working on portraiture a couple of years back.
The breeze was starting to get a little more pronounced at this point and I had to start being really careful with the shutter speed. I believe I was venturing into ISO 800 with more frequency here. Fortunately, I knew that I wasn’t going to be boosting shadows with these so I wasn’t worried at all about noise. In fact, there was every chance that I was going to be deepening the shadows which would further hide any noise that was being introduced. Every time I shoot in these types of situations with my aging DSLR, I am reminded about how wrong I had been for years about avoiding high ISO. Sure, the new mirrorless cameras are better at keeping noise at bay, but this old technology still does a fantastic job when the existing light is good. While there was no direct sunlight, the light was plenty bright to allow the sensor to expose all of the details without any undue noise being added.
Eventually, I made it back around to the area of the woods that I had started in. I wanted to do more with the little ferns on the ground, but I needed a visual anchor for a composition to work out. I hunted for something that would work with the ferns surrounding it. I found fallen limbs, but those didn’t really add that much to the scene. There were plenty of trees that were growing out of the ferns, but I had to be careful to choose one that added to the overall composition rather than just being a tree. In time, I did find one that had a bit of insect damage leading to a hole. This was the one that I wanted to photograph because the hole gave the tree interest, and the sap that had spilled out gave the tree character.
Because every part of this image was in very close proximity to each other, I really wanted to figure out a way to keep the attention on the tree and the ferns while allowing the background to go blurry to show depth. In order to get the entire tree and the ferns in focus, I was going to have to set an aperture that would keep the background too much in focus. The only way to blur the background was to go nearly wide open at f/4. Even here, the lower portion of the trunk went soft, but I had the ferns and the hole in the trunk reasonably in focus. To further add to the separation, I desaturated the background, darkened it, and cooled it slightly. The end result has a lot more depth than the original photo had. It really became about just those aspects that I wanted to concentrate on while the rest of the scene just provided context and textures.
It was now right around 9am when the fog advisory was supposed to be lifted. There was still a bit of fog in the area, but it was burning off pretty quick. I started to look around the property to see if there was anything else that I wanted to shoot. I spent some time over on the East side where the sun was starting to shine through the fog. It made for an interesting view over the trees and I tried to capture that for a little while. There turned out to be too much contrast and I didn’t like how the photos were looking so I moved on. Back on the West side, I started looking down the driveway and saw that the fog was still looking pretty good that way. The stamped concrete had a nice sheen to it from the wetness of the morning, and the natural curve of the driveway was as captivating as always. I decided to swap lenses and go with my standard zoom for this shot. I wanted to make the terminal end of the driveway as small as I could so that the road and the neighbor’s house weren’t included in the composition. I had to be careful with the focal length though because if I went too wide, there would be too much sky in the frame and the foreground driveway would be too wide since it splits at this part.
I was able to find the right balance in focal length and got a composition that I liked. The polarizer was dialed in just a little bit to temper the sheen on the concrete slightly. I made a couple of exposures of this composition with slight changes in framing so that I had options when it came time to choose which one to process. It was not very easy to see what was going on since the camera was elevated well above my head to get the right perspective on things while minimizing the sky.
The end result was an image that I liked, but I wasn’t sure if I liked it because this was home, or because it was a solid photograph. Before I started on the blog, I had sent all of the processed files to Toni so that she could see what I had been working on all morning. When she got back to me, she let me know that this was her favorite one of the day. Since she is such a good judge of black and white photos, I took that as a good sign that this was a solid photograph after all. I’m glad that I decided to hold onto it.
With the driveway still firmly in my creative mind, I decided to go over to the other side of the yard and check out the trail that belongs to our neighbor. There was still just enough atmosphere in the woods to pull this off. The light was also getting quite good with the sun starting to burn through the fog to the right of this frame. This made a lot of the vegetation glow in the soft, diffused sunlight. It took me a little while to get the right positioning for this composition because I wanted to make sure that the trail added to the visual flow rather than pull the attention. It was the pale yellow leaves on the left that I wanted to really grab the attention as that tree really complimented the green needles on the foreground trees. The path just allowed the eyes to work into the scene until the fog took over.
Outside of getting the composition just right, the hardest part of this one was getting those pale leaves to stop blowing in the wind. Nothing else was moving in the scene, but those leaves were going nuts. I had to be patient in order to wait for the breeze to die down while I had also selected an ISO of 400 to allow for a relatively fast shutter speed. It worked out for two of the frames and here is the best composition between those two.
That was the last photo that I shot for the morning, as the sun was starting to really make things too bright. I also wanted to get back home and see what I had captured. Normally, that would mean a drive back to the house that could last an hour or more. This time, it was just a simple walk to the garage where I took my wet boots off and put the camera back on the shelf before getting the memory card out. There is something to be said for going on a trek in the yard. It was one of the most convenient outings I have had in quite some time. It also goes to show that photographers really don’t need to travel far and wide to find places to shoot.
For many years, I have advocated shooting close to home. It allows you the opportunity to be very familiar with the options out there not to mention being able to react to the weather as it is happening. Even though I had relatively close location in mind for this morning, what I ended up shooting posed absolutely no questions as to what the conditions were. I was able to look at the woods from the kitchen window while eating my oatmeal. I already understood the light and conditions before I even saw my camera bag. In about an hour and a half, I had shot 69 frames and processed a dozen of those files. I tossed two of them because they just didn’t quite seem to stand out from the others leaving me with ten keepers from my own yard. I certainly can’t complain about that.
Thank you for joining me on this big adventure into my yard. I do hope that you have enjoyed the story as well as the photos that have gone along with it. Should any of these photos speak to you, consider purchasing a print to hang on your wall. While I probably don’t have enough time to get a print done and delivered before Christmas, art always makes a great gift, even it to yourself.
Speaking of Christmas, in case I’m not back here beforehand, I hope that everyone has a very Merry Christmas and I’ll be seeing you soon with a collection of the twelve most significant images of the year as well as a yearly review coming in on New Year’s Day. I’m hoping to get one last trek in before the close of the year. With two weeks left, that shouldn’t be a problem, but time has really been slipping by here over the last year. It still feels like it should be June at the latest.
Until next time…
