383 - Fog Creeping



Late in the afternoon, or better, what’s to be called late these seasons, I drove to a neighboring village to buy some provisions, because tomorrow, All-Saints, is a public holiday in Austria. We are a very catholic country.

When I left, I had already decided to leave the camera bag at home, knowing that I had taken some usable images in the morning, but in the last moment I returned and grabbed it, and now I’m glad that I did.

On my way, the sun was already down, I suddenly saw fog creeping up, and it looked ghostly, just as if it would seep out of the ground. I parked the car at the first place possible, grabbed the camera, the remote control and the tripod, and ran back some 100 meters to the place you see here.

I made three series of bracketed exposures, seven each, with the intent to create HDR images. When I came home, I processed the last series, the best one, with Photomatix Pro and then worked on it in Photoshop.

I didn’t like it. Photomatix strongly emphasizes local contrasts, and in this case that produced a halo above the clouds. The sky looked uneven, unnatural. As a result, I threw away the fruits of more than an hour of work, loaded three of the original exposures as layers in Photoshop, and blended them with masks. The result looks much more natural.

The Song of the Day is “Right Tool For The Job” from Marcia Ball’s 2005 album “Live! Down the Road”. Sorry, no lyrics found.