STOPPING BY WOODS ON A FOGGY EVENING

A few evenings ago it was foggy and rainy, and I headed for some woods a few miles from my home, hoping to catch some interesting fog shots.  These woods are on private property, and I felt a little uncomfortable walking up a winding driveway with my camera and tripod, just hoping that the owner didn't come along.

Well, things were a bit disappointing because, as it turned out, the rain was worse than the fog and I just wasn't going to get the sort of photos I was hoping for.  I did, though, take a few shots of the broader scene in the dying light.  When I got home I decided that the photos as originally shot didn't have much to offer.  However, when I tried converting them to black & whites, they became a little more interesting.

The scene was actually much darker than these images would indicate.  Not only did I convert the shots to black & whites, I wound up increasing their exposure by two f-stops in post processing.  Basically, the only other adjustment I made was to reduce the contrast.  The overall result is unusual in that anything in the images that was originally green, including the ground cover, appears very light in the B&W.  This is not my usual experience with B&W, so I'm speculating that the unusual quality of these grayscale conversions was a function of the ambient evening light.

For the record, both of these were shot at an aperture of f/9 and an ISO of 250 for an exposure of 10 seconds.  I think the second shot has a better composition and tells more of a story.

John