I have been admiring and inspired by the work of Mark Littlejohn and Colin Bell for quite some time now. What I admire most about their work is how they image trees and woodland in a crisp and uncluttered manner. I love trees and woodland, but always struggle to portray them in a way that I like. Mostly, the image get chaotic, cluttered, and without focus. So I have been studying their work and trying to learn from them. When two weeks ago there was some proper fog for the first time this season I knew that this fog could help me to put some of the things I learned into practice, and create a more serene image. However, due to an injury in my shin I could hardly walk, so I had to stay close to home. I used the piece of city-woodland of about 400 meter by 100 meter as the location for this first experiment of photographing woodland in the mist. I used a tripod, which I usually try to avoid, and a small aperture, as I relied on the mist to do the separating of the foreground from the background. But most of all, the fog created a beautiful shade of pastel-green, making it easy to capture these photos.

The first photo I tried resulted in an (automatic) exposure of 32 seconds. Somehow this image provokes a strange kind of feeling for me, it does look like the woodland I know, but also it doesn’t. Anyway, composition-wise not a winner, but I liked how sharp it turned out, and what the mist did for the colors, so I was encouraged to move on.

Somehow in between the trees the light was better, or the sun rose fast enough to give me some more light, but my favourite photos (the ones below and the one on top of this post) have an exposure of only (?) 1.5 to 2 seconds:

I also experimented with a large aperture and high iso, to be able to shoot handheld with normal exposure values. Although I like the photo below, I prefer the ones with smaller aperture and the sharpness from foreground to background. As mentioned before, the mist is enough to do the separation. All in all, a good experiment I think. To be continued when the shin is recovered and the mist has returned!

Thanks for reading!