Monthly Digest: October 2024

Insights and references

On Fog warning

Last October, an intense fog rolled into coastal San Diego. In the early mornings, the marine layer was so dense that you couldn’t see beyond a few feet in front of you. Having moved here from Chicago, the marine layer concept is a novelty to me, and I was so excited to get outside and take some photos.

I spent several mornings wandering around in the fog with my workhorse camera, a Ricoh GR II. I’ve taken plenty of photos of fog over the years, and this time I wanted to try shooting with one of the in-camera presets that I seldom use: a high-contrast black and white setting that produces, you guessed it, high-contrast black and white images. I walked up and down the pier in my neighborhood and was repeatedly spooked by seagulls appearing out of nowhere. It was great. The weather did all of the work and the photos basically took themselves. 

A week or so later, the fog had rolled on and I sat down to look at the images. I thought this would be a relatively easy essay to put together given that it was a single set of photos, the work already looked cohesive, and there was no editing to be done. Famous last words!

Here’s what I learned: if you use an in-camera setting, it only holds if you shoot JPEG. Coincidentally, I had chosen to shoot RAW, so when I opened up these files on my computer, there was no high-contrast black and white in sight. This really wasn’t that big of a deal, but the gasp I emitted suggested otherwise. I was expecting something very different! I was going for Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Gorey, Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe even some Nosferatu, if I could find a fisherman with bad posture. In comparison, these looked to be the most bland, low-contrast images I had ever seen.

Me looking at these photos / Nosferatu, 1922

Luckily, I was able to see a small preview of the intended image before it loaded into its full-color calamity. I took some screenshots of these previews, and I did consider using them, but that felt like a cop-out. I decided I would try to replicate the look and feel of the black and white setting in post-production.

Cool; boring

For the last few years, I haven’t been big on editing. I have no presets in Lightroom; I make very few adjustments. I love to crop but that’s a story for another time. My problem with post-production stems from general choice paralysis: there are too many options, so I just avoid it all together. Having a reference image in mind gave me a prompt and a stopping point, which allowed the whole thing to be an interesting exercise.

Cool; boring

After a lot of poking around, I landed somewhere I was relatively happy with. The final set of photos didn’t look exactly like the originals, but they were close, and the goal of this newsletter is experimentation, not perfection. I figured the audience would never know. Well, now you know: these photos were edited to replicate the look of a high contrast B&W in-camera preset that was probably based on the look of high contrast B&W film. Absolutely no smoke nor mirrors were involved in the making of Fog warning.

#96. Fog warning

---

Some other references on fog:

The Endurance expedition, photographed by Frank Hurley. Can’t recommend this book enough.

Larry Bell’s Venice Fog: Recent Investigations

Sally Mann’s Southern Landscapes