Silver Fog

Day 114: Today I am making an exception to my unspoken rule restricting photos shot on a previous day. Why? Because I like photographing fog, and this was a "happy accident" shot yesterday in Pack Forest. I'd forgotten I had the camera set to black-and-white and was concerned that the sun would dispel the rays if I hesitated too long. Even so, the natural monochrome of the scene was such that it took me a second to realize what was missing in the recorded image, i.e., color. I reshot, but in the end, decided I liked the black-and-white version best.

My first experience with using a 35mm film camera came about when I was planning a backcountry trip to take my mother to the ranger station where her brother had served in the 1950s. I had always been reluctant to learn how to use a "real" camera, having grown up with a box Brownie and later a Polaroid Instamatic, but my husband was an accomplished photographer and convinced me to carry his Mamiya-Sekor on the trip after giving me a crash course in operating it. I returned home a week later with several rolls of exposed film, and many of the images were of fog winding amongst the trees or drifting over the lake. Thus my love of "fogtography" began.

Hiking in fog is a magical experience (at least when it's not so dense that you miss the ends of switchbacks as I've done on several occasions). Trees and shrubbery take on new dimensions as the fog accentuates their distance from other objects. Though blurred by mist, leaves stand apart from their fellows, separated by a gauze of ephemeral droplets. Familiar paths reform their curves and corners into mysterious new topographies. Distances shorten in the sight and lengthen in the mind, relativistically skewed in time and space by the playful wraiths of fog. Fog-walks are not to everyone's taste, their magic taking an eerie inflection with concealments and illusions, but those of us who know the fog-faeries delight in their innocent mischief and revel in their pranks. Fog is friendly. Fog is fun, and it gives us a hazy, dizzy new perspective on an otherwise mundane world.