STOPPING BY WOODS ON A FOGGY MORNING

Recently we were blessed with a dense fog that lasted through the morning, and I had the opportunity to take advantage of the weather by doing some photography.  I included some of those fog shots in the prior two posts involving a tree farm and horse farms.  Even before sunrise that day, to take advantage of the conditions, I was driving to the tree farm that was featured in my post of December 5.  However, on the way I passed a large woods in the western part of Mequon that is owned privately and decided to stop and get a few shots before moving on to the tree farm.  The woods were separated from the road by a wire fence, and it would have been difficult to take clear shots directly from the road.  So I ventured on to one of the private lanes leading from the road into the woods.  Whatever homes were located on the property were set back at least a few hundred yards from the road, and I just hoped that no one cared that I had parked my car just off the lane and was walking around in the woods.

So here is one of the first shots that I got.

Both the early hour and the fog combined to reduce the amount of available light, and because I wanted to achieve as much depth of field as I could, I had the aperture set at f/13.  The exposure for this shot was one second, so I was shooting with a tripod.  I liked this shot for the "knot" of small branches on the left side of the image.  By the way, I really didn't modify the white balance in post processing for these early shots.  The blue light was simply a function of the early hour.

Here are a couple more early shots in which I featured as foreground some of the leaves that were still clinging to their branches.

On my way back from the tree farm an hour later I had only a few minutes to catch a few more shots in the woods before an appointment I had to attend to, and here is what I got.  Note first the vast change in the color of the ambient light.

I have mixed feelings about these shots.  I did like the shot that featured a single maple leaf, but I was shooting handheld at this point and using a larger aperture setting.  As a result I was winding up with a shallower depth of field, particularly with respect to the more distant background trees.  As to the last shot, I thought the small horizontal branch helped.

After my appointment, the fog had still not lifted, so I made a third trip to the woods to get a few final shots.

I think there is a little too much going on in the above shot, and the configuration of the leaves doesn't have the balance that I was hoping for.  I thought that the following shot did a better job of creating balance between the foreground leaves and background trees.

I like the above shot because of the unusual symmetrical configuration of trees in the foreground.  The fact that I included the leaf-strewn floor of the woods also helped to create context and depth for the composition.  Compare it to the following shot that is elevated above the floor of the woods.

Interesting but as more of an abstract.

Finally, I spotted a pretty much dead evergreen whose bare angled limbs were providing a nice contrast to the vertical trunks of the surrounding trees.

It was at about this time that someone drove by on the private lane leading into the woods.  They slowed down, I waved, and they drove on.  I am thankful for their understanding.

John