Weak sunlight breaks through Central Valley tule fog to illuminate trees and brush growing on a levee near the Cosumnes River.
This morning started out with extremely dense Central Valley tule fog – at first so thick that I more or less gave up photographing. But eventually, as usually happens, the upper layers of the fog began to thin, and some light began to filter down through the fog. By late in the morning the fog was thinning enough that very pale sunlight began to show through and softly light the dense vegetation on this levee along the edges of the Cosumnes River. This is an incredibly rich environment in the winter, especially with all of the water from winter rains and the nearby river, and the vegetation grows very thick here.
A bird wades in a flooded Central Valley winter field in front of a receding line of power poles and some farm buildings on a levee.
This is (yet another!) photograph of the flooded fields along a country road near the Cosumnes River in California’s Central Valley. I was shooting almost directly into the sun through remaining fog and haze near the middle of a winter day. The building sits on a levee between the fields and the bird was kind enough to pose for me while I made the photograph.
Given one of the subjects subject that I’ve been discussing at the blog during the past few days, it seems reasonable to point out that this image involved significant work during the post-processing phase – what we used to refer to as “the darkroom,” but which we now refer to as “photoshop.” I used a variety of techniques to push this image towards what I had in mind – a very high key interpretation that I hope evokes the sensation of looking into a backlit hazy atmosphere that is so bright that you can barely look at it. (In fact, it was very much like this when I made the photograph – as you can see it required a 1/1000 second exposure at f/8 and ISO 100. That’s bright!) In general I brought the overall brightness up to nearly pure white in the lightest portions of the image, and I employed some other techniques to lower the amount of contrast in the sky yet keep the building, the poles, and the levee fairly dark. Although all of this was accomplished in the “digital darkroom,” all of the processes are equivalent to those that might have been applied by photographers working in the traditional darkroom.
A solitary tree and a winter pond on a very foggy Central Valley morning, Cosumnes River Wildlife Preserve.
On my first visit to this wildlife preserve in California’s Central Valley (located between Stockton and Sacramento) I was thinking that I might have a chance to photograph wildlife, namely that incredible number of migrating birds that spend their winters in the rich, wet areas of this part of California. I knew it would be foggy, but I like that. (If you have followed my blog for even a short time you have perhaps seen some of my “barely there” photographs in which most details are nearly entirely obscured by clouds, rain, mist, or fog. )
I was not disappointed by a lack of fog! When I arrived it was so thick that I couldn’t see more than perhaps 100 or 200 feet! The Central Valley fog us tule fog which rises from the wet ground rather than blowing in from somewhere else. (The latter is the type of fog in, say, San Francisco, where it often blows in off the ocean.) Since tule fog starts at ground level, it often is not that thick. On a number of occasions I’ve been driving (slowly!) though terribly thick tule fog in the Central Valley, so thick that it seemed risky to drive at even 25 mph, only to look up and see stars in the sky overhead! On my way past Tracy on this morning, as I entered the fog I noted that it was perhaps only 30-50 feet deep. Because of this, the fog has a special quality that is not found as often in the ocean fog that is more common in the San Francisco Bay Area. The tule fog seems often to me to have a luminous quality that I attribute to the light that comes down from above even in the thickest fog.
That was somewhat the case here. I walked into the slough area across the road from the visitor center at the Preserve, and into an area that is mostly open fields in the summer, but mostly a giant pond in the winter. Everywhere around me I could hear the hundreds or thousands of waterfowl – ducks, geese, and who knows what else, and I later saw egrets and sandhill cranes – but I could see almost nothing. Eventually I could just barely make out his small tree standing on a shallow area where some grasses grew. I wondered if the photograph would have enough contrast to even be usable, but in the end there was just enough detail. (It is hard to see in the small jpg, but it is certainly there in the 12 x 18 test print I made.) At first I thought it would end up being a monochrome photograph, and I spent a lot of time taking it through my workflow with that in mind. But something just wasn’t quite working for me, so I decided to reconsider and try a color rendition. In the print, I think that this ends up looking better in color in several ways. First, the soft blue cast that I thought I’d want to avoid, more strongly evokes for me the feeling of actually being there, especially through that luminous quality of the tule fog light that I mentioned earlier. In addition, I think that some of the very subtle color variations turn out to be important.
Black oak trees with a few remaining autumn leaves in foggy and snow-covered El Capitan Meadow, Yosemite Valley.
I’m always fascinated by the trees in El Capitan Meadow – it doesn’t matter whether it is spring when the meadow is green and the trees are getting new leaves, summer when the meadow is filled with people watching climbers overhead on El Capitan, fall when the grasses turn golden and the leaves change to fall colors, or winter when the meadow may be snow-covered. Sometimes I tell myself that I’m just going to drive past on my way to another destination, but I almost always end up stopping for a least a brief look around – and I frequently end up making a few photographs.
That was the case on this mid-January day, when I drove through on my way to make photographs up on Crane Flat Road. As I passed by the meadow I noticed that low fog was floating above the snow, so I pulled over to look at the scene more closely. I was somewhat surprised to see how many leaves were still hanging on the oak trees so late in the season, and I decided to try to find a photograph that would include them, along with the snow and a bit of the fog and the dark shapes of the tree trunks.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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