Cloudy Combination

Here is another from the stormy Saturday we just encountered, here in San Diego county. I was out east and was driving back to get  on the I-8 freeway and head back into San Diego, when I saw the fog rolling in. I had other intuitions of coming over here earlier in the day, because it had snowed a little, as well. Funny enough, the road I took this from is called Sunrise Highway. This was also taken not long before sunset. Talk about the name of the highway not living up to it's name.

The one thing that captured my interest was the lone house sitting on top of the hill. I hurried to find a turn-out on the road, so I could get in position before the fog engulfed this house. The main interest though, was the fog and also the clearing clouds in the sky. That is why I didn't zoom in so close to make it just about the clouds surrounding the house. If it was maybe just the fog down in the valley, then perhaps. But the clouds clearing from the storm and the fog just dominate this photo and so the subject is not necessarily just about the fog or the clouds in the sky, but about the clouds in general. Kind of an interesting combination.

One of the hardest things to post process, in my opinion, is a scene with fog. The reason is, it is so easy to increase the contrast too much. A scene with fog will have low contrast throughout the scene. If you did your levels or curves in Photoshop, you would grossly adjust the contrast, via this method. So many people who post process, use the levels method, will always pull both sliders in till they hit the first pixels on the histogram. That is what so many instructional photoshop books will advise you to do. This is a big error, I feel. There are many times where you will not have pure blacks or whites in a scene. This is one of these cases.

I think this looks good here. I thought about cropping down to a 16:9 ratio. But, I felt it would cram the clouds in the sky too much. I felt room was needed for the clouds to roam in this scene. You can sense the fog rolling in and the clouds dispersing in the sky above the hills.

This was a rare treat to get here in San Diego county. For most of the year, we have the same usual, blank, blue skies. The stormy weather was the reason I went out to do photography this day and I am glad I got some dramatic results.