Do you take photos only when the weather conditions are optimal? If I followed that rule, I’d be staying at home most of the time. This winter in particular, it seems like I am at work on all of the days with good weather. So often I will choose to go out with my camera when I am free and not when the weather is good.
One particular morning last week it was really foggy and visibility was extremely limited. The subjects that I could see were hazy and indistinct, utterly lacking in contrast. It’s hard to know how what camera setting to use in situations like those.
I was at Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge, my favorite spot this winter for wildlife photography, and as usual I managed to spot some Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). It is always a challenge to photograph the eagles, because they tend to perch a good distance away from the trails that I follow and they are often quite skittish.
In this case, the difficulties were magnified, because of the heavy fog/mist. I ended up processing the images that I captured in a number of different ways, attempting at times to enhance the contrast or eliminate some of the fog, with varying degrees of success.
Here are a few of my favorite shots of the eagles in the mist.
© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.
Mike Powell 
I feel your pain, as they say. Since my work is weather dependent, there are plenty of times when a good day means I have to go to work, no matter how much I’d rather be out and about with the camera. Still, fog, rain, and wind are part of the world, too, and provide their own sorts of opportunities. Carpe Camera!
I love that–Carpe Camera. If I were a pro, I might have the luxury of waiting for perfect conditions and only showing perfect photos. My standards are different and I enjoy showing photos of things that interest me or that I find cool or unusual, even though most of them are far from perfect. That’s how life is for most of us. 🙂
I agree with you about the weather. When I am at work, the weather is nice. When I have a day off, it rains, etc. But it gives you the opportunity to learn to get the most out of what you have! Plus you learn techniques to overcome difficulties and also get some interesting or moody shots most people ignore. I have friends that say they do not even take a camera out on cloudy days. But that is like a giant soft box, great for flowers, macro, bugs, etc. Plus it pushes you to become a better photographer.
Light clouds make the perfect conditions, much more so than brilliant sunshine, for the very reasons that you stated. Still, it’s hard to beat the golden hours for beautiful lighting. I tend to look at myself as an opportunistic shooter and enjoy walking around with my camera, keeping my eyes open, ready to react when an opportunity presents itself.
The thing with cameras is that they do not always produce what the eye sees, in my last two posts I have been having problems photographing birds in snow but managed to tweak the images to gain detail, the worse problem is heat haze,not much danger of that at the moment! Regards Brian
Your first sentence is no exaggeration, Brian. Digital sensors don’t capture certain colors well and the atmospheric phenomena, like the fog I was dealing with or the heat haze you mention add to the layers of complexity. Sometime, we can use exposure compensation before the shot and sometimes we can make adjustments after the fact in postprocessing. Sometimes, though, you do the best you can, but end up having to live with what you got.
Love how the mist looks like a filter on your lens… Great shots, Mike! 👍
Thanks, jill. It was amazing how foggy it was. At a certain point in time, I had to wipe off the lens because it was getting a bit fogged up too–I noticed when autofocusing became even more difficult.