I just realized I’d never written a third post I’d planned about the fog we wandered around in last month. So far, you’ve seen the fog hanging over Tübingen that day, as well as the patches of blue mixed with fog in spots. But if those photos could be described as showing a foggy day, the photos in today’s gallery seem to show a foggy night, even though they were taken in the middle of the same day as the photos in those other two posts.In fact, the main difference is that in the photos I’m showing today, I deliberately used settings on the camera to make the images much darker than the scene was in real life. Then I played with the resulting “images-in-silhouette” effect in the resulting photos by tinkering with them in the digital darkroom. I had an idea in my head when I took the photos that I wanted to show in the final images, but my idea had nothing to do with showing the in fact very, very bright light that was the result of being in the middle of fog with the sun shining through it. Rather, I saw (in my head) the darker scenes I have captured/created below.

Ansel Adams, in his writing about photography years ago, always talked about how important it was for the photographer to star with an idea for the final photo they want to produce (for a scene in front of them). Getting the final results, he stressed, was always a combination of two things: first, knowing your camera and what it is capable of when taking the photo, and then knowing the tools available in the darkroom to make the final image later. While I always explain these same principles to my students now, I don’t always take this kind of effort every time I take a photograph. But when I do, while I’m not using the same tools Adams taught people about, it’s certainly fun to be able to take this approach with the camera and tools I have at my disposal.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to figure out which version of these I like best, but I still haven’t decided. So you can now be the judge — I’ve posted a few different variations today, before they got lost in the backlog of photos that I keep meaning to post, but never seem to get around to actually sharing. 😉

Anyway, enjoy.