Fog and Reeds. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Dense winter tule fog, tule islands, and a wetland pond.
From time to time I like to do visual experiments, seeing how minimal the content of the image can be and still work. Sometimes these photograph balance on an edge between portrayal of the real and pure color and form. I feel that images like this can portray or evoke the mood of a subject, even if they don’t include much detail at all. The idea is to suggest more than to tell.
The winter tule fogs of California’s Central Valley often do a fine job of minimizing landscape details. (They also do a fine job of minimizing the details of the roads I drive to get there, but I digress…) These shallow fog layers settle in during the winter and can be some of the thickest fogs you’ll ever encounter. Oddly, because they are so shallow, sometimes your vision straight upwards is barely impeded at all — and as I made this photograph the nearly-full moon was clearly visible overhead. But the view out into the landscape was radically limited, hardly extending more than a few tens of feet and muting details of closer subjects.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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