VIRMOND PARK IN FOG

Fog is a landscape photographer's friend.  We were blessed with some dense fog this weekend, and I tried to take advantage of it with a quick trip to nearby Virmond Park, situated on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.

Here are a couple of shots of two of the park's "old friends."

I've shot this bench before and frankly a bit better than this time.  My mistake here was that I should have taken a lower viewpoint, positioning the entire back of the bench against the fog.  Next time, perhaps.

I have shot this isolated tree many times under many different conditions.  It is actually much smaller than it appears.  This photo is deceptive.  The fog was actually more dense than it looks in this shot.  In post processing I tried to bring some definition to the line of trees in the background, if only to provide some context.  I also increased the color saturation, reducing the fog's apparent density.

The park includes a simple rail fence, and I wound up taking a bunch of shots of the fence.  Here are the ones that I kept.

These two shots are a bit weird, as the rails to the right occupy nearly half of the image but don't seem that strange because of our natural understanding of perspective.  A bit too simple though.

I cropped the above shot to reduce the amount of sky/fog in the upper part of the image.  I wanted to have the fence fill the frame.  Works OK, I think.

I thought this was the best of the fence shots, primarily because of the apparent lack of uniformity in the rails, which doesn't say much.

Here is a shot of a line of trees toward the north end of the park.  

Once again, this understates the amount of fog because I increased the saturation.  In this shot I didn't mind that I was cutting off most of the upper portions of the trees, as I wanted to emphasize the trunks.  Also, I decided to allow a little lack of balance in order to include the water puddle in the lower right.

I spent a fair amount of time in the small woods that the park sports.  This is where fog can be the most beneficial, as it can eliminate distractions in the distant background while providing depth in the fore- and mid-ground.  

These shots have been cropped significantly.  Initially, the images included the tree trunks all the way to the ground.  However, as I played with these images, I decided that including the ground distracted from the contrast between the trunks and the fogged sky, resulting in a loss of depth that the fog was creating with respect to the more distant trees.  So I cropped the shots down to include just the portion against the sky.

John