There’s magic in fog. Some may curse it for what it obscures (the cars ahead on the freeway, the address of a house you’re looking for, the unpleasant person lurking in wait). But as a photographer in a place where fog is relatively rare, I relish it. The sight of morning fog sends me scurrying outside with my camera, eager to discover new ways of looking at ordinary things.
Photographers, you see, like clean backgrounds. That’s why portrait and product photographers invest in cloth and paper backdrops, or seek out plain textured walls, for most of their work. I see fog doing the same. In the case of this photo, the fog obscures the rest of the port: the logging ships and cranes, other boats and docks, and the horizon. It focuses the attention, because there’s nowhere else for the eye to wander than onto the subject, in this case the historic tugboat Sand Man.
Slow down, and enjoy the fog. It’ll be gone before long.
