Fog Studies

Fog is the most generous weather for a photographer. It simplifies everything. Clutter disappears. Backgrounds dissolve. Objects that would normally compete for attention fade, one by one, into soft grey, until only the nearest things remain. A messy, ordinary landscape becomes, for a few hours, something closer to a drawing.

Over one winter, I returned again and again to the same small valley a short drive from the studio, on every morning the forecast promised fog. This series is twelve photographs from those mornings, all made on black-and-white film.

Waiting for weather

Fog is unreliable. It forms when air near the ground cools enough for water vapour to condense into tiny droplets, often on still, clear nights after a damp day — but knowing that it might form is very different from knowing it will. I lost count of the mornings I drove out in the dark, set up my camera and watched the sun rise into a perfectly clear sky.

When it did come, it rarely lasted. Most mornings, the fog would begin to lift within an hour or two of sunrise, thinning and drifting until the valley was back to its everyday self. I learned to work quickly and to accept that some mornings would produce one frame, or none.

Distance

The great lesson of fog is about distance. In clear air, a landscape is a single, flat picture with everything visible at once. In fog, it becomes a series of layers — near, middle and far — each one paler than the last. The eye reads that fading as depth, and the result can feel almost three-dimensional.

I became obsessed with lines of objects receding into the grey: a row of fence posts, a hedge, a line of trees beside a stream. In each case, the nearest object is sharp and dark, and each one behind it is a little fainter, until the last ones are barely there at all. It's a simple idea, and it never stopped being beautiful.

Fog doesn't hide the landscape. It edits it.

A single tree

Halfway through the winter, I found a lone oak standing in the middle of a field. In clear weather it was unremarkable, surrounded by houses, power lines and a distant road. In fog, all of that vanished, and the tree stood completely alone in a white void.

I photographed it on six separate mornings, in different densities of fog. Laid side by side, the prints show the tree slowly appearing and disappearing, like a figure stepping in and out of a doorway. It's my favourite sequence I've ever made, and it's printed as a single long panel in the exhibition.

Walking in the white

Photographing in dense fog is a strange experience. Sound changes first: distant traffic disappears, birdsong becomes muffled and close, and your own footsteps seem very loud. Then your sense of direction goes. More than once, I walked confidently towards a gate I'd passed a hundred times and found myself somewhere else entirely.

I learned to stay close to field boundaries, carry a compass and leave a note in the car saying where I'd gone. Fog is beautiful, but it deserves respect.

There's a particular kind of solitude in it, too. You cannot see anyone, and nobody can see you. The world shrinks to a circle a few metres wide that moves with you as you walk. For a photographer, that circle becomes the whole world: whatever falls inside it is your subject, and everything else simply doesn't exist.

Editing the series

The winter produced around forty usable negatives. Twelve made the final series. The rest were either too thin to print well or too similar to frames I liked more. I chose images that each did something slightly different with distance: one object alone, a line of objects receding, layers of landscape fading away.

Printing fog

Fog is notoriously hard to print. The negatives are thin and low in contrast, and it is very easy to produce a print that looks merely grey and dull. The trick is to preserve the delicate gradations in the fog while keeping a true black somewhere in the frame — usually the nearest object — so that the eye has an anchor.

Most prints in this series took several sessions in the darkroom to get right. I worked on a warm-toned fibre paper, which gives the greys a slightly soft, almost pearly quality that I think suits the subject better than a cold, neutral paper.

Why fog

People sometimes ask why I keep returning to weather that hides things. I think it's because fog asks you to slow down and look closely at what's in front of you, rather than reaching for the grand view. In a culture that wants to see everything, all at once, there's something restful about a morning when you can only see a few metres ahead.

Technical notes

• Camera: 6×7 medium-format film camera on a tripod
• Film: ISO 400 black-and-white, rated slightly slower for denser negatives
• Development: extended development to boost contrast
• Prints: warm-tone fibre-based silver gelatin, selenium toned

Prints

Fog Studies was our first series published on Darkroom. All editions have now sold out except for the oak sequence panel, available in a final edition of 5. See Prints.