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It's the "off" season now, so I must find other things to shoot. Hell, I'm "off" in the storm season anymore anyway! Can't find the good stuff to shoot that time of the year now, lol. Fog serves this purpose well. I'm a big fan of the low stuff, not the general thick fog. To get a nice batch of this stuff, you really need crops to still be in the ground, not harvested, recent rains help, and a cool night. Knowing that lined up this night, I woke up early. Not just that, but I opted to drive into Omaha and pick up the Canon XSi instead of ordering it and waiting till next week. It's funny, I crack on those that do this instead of ordering online, since it is so silly to pay that much more. But look at me, I got the 10-22 EF-s, the 17-40L and now this camera all this way at different times, because I thought I needed them that night or the next day. Anyway, I wake up really early and head into Iowa, where I find thick fog. It amazes me the difference it makes between just over the river and in town. Feels about 10 degrees colder each time. This fog was really cool, probably 100 feet deep, maybe. At times you could see about 1 block. Yet you look up out your window and there is this black night sky full of bright stars. It's really cool. So I pull over and snap a couple pictures of it.
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This scene/image scared me on my new Canon XSi. I was at 400 ISO, 20 or so seconds and wide open. I look at it on the LCD and it looks VERY noisy. I thought, what the hell. I wondered if it was the much much bigger LCD and resolution making it look that way, or if it was indeed this much noisier than my old XT. Scared me enough I took my XT out and said to hell with this XSi for now. I wasn't going to waste the setting on a camera I was unsure of. This one is looking back towards Blair on highway 30. Damn the powerlines. I didn't see those. (turned out it was just the lcd and it wasn't as bad as it looked to be)
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Same place as above, but I think with the XT now. My image numbering is all screwed up now. For starters, I set my XSi to 5:30 Friday night, not noticing they used military time. So it thought it was 5:30 a.m. and now this next morning thinks it is 5:30 p.m. So it was off a day for the date. Secondly, the XSi would start from 0000 in image numbering. Well I used both cameras this day a lot. When I dumped my XT to my computer I used the new software with the XSi. It never used the image numbers the XT applied to the image. I instead had it set to start them from 0000 when it put them onto the computer, chopping off their image numbers and using those instead. So I now have conflicting dates and two cameras whose numbers started at 0000 the same day. Thankfully I'll be using the XSi alone most of the time now and have this figured out. For this day and the following though, it's a mess on my pc for image numbers.
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I'm now in Pisgah Iowa. I had to hurry and get up there before twilight light started kicking in, which is about an hour before sunrise(5:50). It was probably 5:00 a.m. and here I am already 40 minutes from home. It felt a little strange, being in this small city park then. I wonder how many others are this dedicated to fog! lol Of course I didn't just come up here to shoot fog. I came up here to shoot fog from the big hill north of town. That and head back to Murray Hill if the fog was too deep. Ok, so I was up there just for fog, but not the town shots. It sucks I finally get this good thick, but low fog, with clear skies above it....and I don't have the moon like I wanted. Moon-lit scenes of this and the next couple mornings would have ruled. That is a street light behind corn in the above image.
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Same park.
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This is why I drove up here. It's always foggy up here, if other areas don't quite get there. Like a little pooled in area in the hills, full of crops. That and there is a nice steep hill/road to use to look out onto the fog from. I wanted to look down on the fog with the stars above. The fog however was a smidge deep, extending up to the top of this hill. Close enough, but not quite what I was hoping for.
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You can see I'm pretty even with the top of the fog out there, looks murky. Twilight light just starting to show up.
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There are steep hills on either side of my car. I noticed something "standing" on the one. It was still dark then. I was like, what the hell is that. Then I was like, damn it, why did I have to even notice it. I then got the flash light out, as I sat back in my car. I thought, hmmm, I'm not terribly sure I want to shine the light on it and see what it is. I did anyway, and still couldn't tell what it was. Great! I got back out and "blocked" it out of my head as I shot from on top of my car. I believe I turned the car lights off part way into this one as to not blow the scene out in that area.
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Parking lights only on during this one. The fog really spreads the lights around on the longer exposures. Still using 400 ISO wide open for about 20-30 seconds. I'm guessing the shutter was shorter on this one, but the parking lights were on for the full shot.
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Jumped into the shot. It was still really dark out to the eyes. As I stood still there, I thought, "stay away creature on the hill". I left before it was light enough to really see whatever it was, but now that I think about it, I bet I have an image of it from the 9th when I came back up here(I do, it's on that page).
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The fog was just a hair too deep at the Pisgah hill. So I flew back to Murray Hill, only about 7 miles from there. I'm just getting things out of my car now, still down in the parking lot.
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Part way up the hill. Crazy cool sight to the east now! Like a flooding pool, fog oozing up and out of them, and down into the valley behind me to the west.
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Up on Murray Hill quite a ways. You can see the stuff coming out of the hills and going down to the valley floor on the left.
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Sparrows?
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Looking west, above the clouds. Google Earth tells me the top of this hill is 300 feet above the fields. The lighting mostly sucked, thanks to some cirrus and then some low clouds blocking out the sun. Had I been 2 miles south I'd likely have been in great lightning for most of this. The above was during some better lighting. |
