I am musing today on Applied Texture over at Mortal Muses, come by and say hello. This image was captured on our day trip to Sirmione last weekend, and I just loved the piece of the castle jutting out into the lake. Beautiful light and reflections, a reminder of an era gone by. Perfect for a little texture to age it.
I love digital photography, for the way it can alter our view. Here’s the original image, before the texture. A different feel, don’t you agree? Which do you like best?
We head out today for a weekend trip to London, to visit my wonderful muse friend Kirstin and hopefully meet some of you at our photowalk on Sunday.
It’s so amazing to me, to find I now have friends all over the world because of my blog. I hope that I get to meet some of you on my future travels! Drop me a note via email if you are in any of these places we’ll be visiting in the next few months, I would love to meet up:
Sicily, Italy
Santorini and Athens, Greece
Prague
Oslo, Norway
If you are anywhere around northern Italy, let me know too. A day trip is always fantastic!
Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to capture some fog with your camera if it shows up near you.
Winter brings fog, one of the most wonderful weather patterns for photography. I know I’ve said it before here on the blog, but I love fog! Because you can only see what is right in front of you, there is a delicious sense of mystery, of things slowly revealed.
Fog forms when there is high humidity along with a temperature that is very close to the dew point, it is essentially a low lying clound. You can read more about the science of fog here. It will form readily near bodies of water, like lakes and rivers, and in cooler temperatures. That’s why you often find fog early in the morning, dissipating as the weather warms up.
I’ve had the good luck to live two places now where fog is common: Oregon and northern Italy. It forms frequently here at my house in Italy, since we are right near the large Parco di Monza through which the Lambro River runs. A large, natural open space is a great source of fog – temperatures are always cooler in the park and the moisture is abundant from the landscape.
How can you use fog as an element in your photography? Here are a few ideas…
Fog provides a great backdrop, to capture a single element. A distracting background can be completely hidden in the fog. I use this feature to capture silhouettes, like the lead-in image of the post and this image below. The detail is highlighted by the blank backdrop. I also converted both of these to black and white, to heighten the contrast. One thing to be careful of with fog is underexposure, because the light white background will dominate your camera’s meter readings. Play around with overexposing your images just a little bit to compensate.
As you move closer to a object, fog slowly reveals. Vary your distance to a subject to create a different effect and feel in your images. The two images below are of the same tree on the same day, but taken at different distances. The first one, farther away from the camera, creates that sense of mystery I was talking about earlier.
In this image, you can see how interesting it can be to capture the sun through the fog. This was an unusual day, because the fog seemed to be disappearing from the bottom up rather than the top down.
Finally, don’t forget about capturing the world in fog at night. You know I love night! Fog seems to amplify the artificial lights of night, creating a warm glow that is unlike any other night effect. I did no color or exposure correction on these, I liked them as they came out of the camera.
I know many of us are anxiously awaiting summer for the warmth and light of the sun. Instead of focusing on what you don’t have right now, take a moment to celebrate fog, one of the delightful gifts of winter.
Today I am going to try something different! As a welcome to the participants in the Scavenger Hunt from Ashley Sisk’s Ramblings and Photos, I’m going to open the linky today and keep it open for two weeks. (If you are in a blog reader, come over to the blog to see the link tool.) I’ll still post the linky next Thursday for Share Your View as usual, if you want some time to capture the fog or look through your archive.
In addition, I’m going to give away a set of my Black and White postcards by random drawing to one person who links in a fog photo. I haven’t given away a set of these yet on my blog, and since this set includes the foggy tree image it is the perfect time to give these away.
Thanks for sticking with me! Good luck with your fog photos, I look forward to seeing what you capture. You can find the code to copy and paste the Exploring with a Camera button on your blog here.
I truly believe that ignorance is bliss. I believe there are times starting things without a clue as to the work involved is a good thing.
Being full of uneducated optimism, we start down a path. We don’t ask people who know, who have followed this path before, because they might say, “Wow, you have no idea what you taking on.” And they might tell us, and burst our bubble. Or if they do tell us, we don’t listen, being so full of our wonderful idea.
Bringing an idea into the world, whether it be a novel or a business or a painting, is hard enough work without knowing the full extent of the effort. Having the courage to take things on and start, one little bit at a time, can sometimes seem momentous on its own. Once you are caught up in the wave of creative expression, you find you believe in your idea and want to make it work, at any cost. You are willing to surmount any obstacle to get it done and out in the world.
I’ve learned a small piece of this truth lately, with my Find Your Eye class. I’m celebrating a little bit this week because I finished the final edits on the course two days ago. Yes, the class has already started, we are in week three. No, my schedule did not go as planned. “Finishing” ended up being much more work than I expected. Than my family expected. Most of my free time in the last month was spent in editing, rewriting and finalizing the material. Considering I work full time, have a family and we travel quite a bit, that was limited time.
Would I do it again? Absolutely, in a heartbeat. I am so proud of how the material has come together into a cohesive whole. I am loving the class, seeing these ideas and tools in the hands of new people who are finding value in them. I know that this was the right thing for me to do.
Would I have started, had I known the real work involved? It’s hard to know, but I suspect not. If I had known I would give up so much of my precious free time in Italy for this at the outset, I might have thought, “Oh, I’ll just start that when I move back to Oregon.” The problem is, I needed to do it now, while the ideas where real and fresh to me. So, like any starry-eyed person with an idea, I started without knowing the effort involved.
I believe that this is one of life’s little tricks, to allow us begin on a path without knowing the full extent of work we will have to do. It may be the only way to get us invested at the outset, so that we bring new, good, amazing ideas into the world to share. If we truly knew the cost, we might stay on the couch and read a book. Instead, we create.
Ignorance is bliss. I’m a firm believer. How about you?
I have been fascinated with skies lately. Whenever I am out and about, I find myself capturing a few images of mostly sky. Maybe just a little bit of something else, to ground the image, like this tree in silhouette.
There is so much possibility in the sky. It’s wide open, too big to capture it all with the camera. I can only capture little glimpses, enough to give an impression. The glimpses are so fleeting, as the sky is ever changing. The clouds and the light do not hold for any photographer, I have to catch what I can.
I am once again reminded of the Spiral of Creativity by this image of the sky. We do the best we can to capture the fleeting inspiration that comes to us, and pull it into our spiral. We figure out how to make this transitory and insubstantial thing, this idea, into something real. For all of the giant, expansive nature of ideas, we have to break them down. Frame them into something manageable in order to proceed.
Turn an idea into a manageable plan. Capture a piece of the sky. It’s all the same thing, and about as easy to do either. Yet, I am challenged to continue trying. Maybe, just once in a while, something great comes out of the effort. Something I can share with you.
A craggy castle on the tip of a peninsula, guarding against intruders to a land of days gone by. This castle is in Sirmione on Lake Garda, an hour and a half drive from our home here in Northern Italy. Yesterday afternoon we took a little day trip out to this town, exploring a new part of this beautiful country. Besides this wonderful castle, there is a nice pedestrian town with wonderful lake views, natural hot springs, roman ruins and the most frigid wind coming off of the lake. A perfect afternoon for some of the best gelato I’ve had in a while!
I love these old castles. They are so solid, so real, even today. You can tell that life was not easy in the days these castles were needed. Bare stone rooms, small spaces, dangerous stairways. The majority of the inhabitants worked long hours in difficult conditions, lived in cramped spaces without much reward other than food, shelter and protection from invading forces.
This vision is so different than our idealized version of castles with turrets and princesses with flowing dresses. I find I like the reality of these solid places better than the gilded rooms of kings and queens later in history. There is something honest and true that resonates in the bare stone, coming through the centuries to speak to me in this age. Do you feel it too?
