Mists In The Forest & The Photographs I Took

 

This week's weather has been mixed with much cloud and mist and some rain and sunshine. The mist has been fascinating though, curling through the forests and drifting half-way up hills. Photographing it has been absorbing. The above image is my favourite of the week. It took a little thought and movement to achieve. It's always satisfying when doing so ends with a result I'm happy with. 

Above is the first image I took looking down into this wooded glen. I quite like it but it doesn't have the intimate quality I wanted so I changed my position a little to include the fallen tree in the foreground and zoomed in to the depths of the glen, cutting out the sky, to get the picture at the top. I didn't have to vary the focal length much, just from 39mm to 45mm (APS-C),  but it made a huge difference. 

I zoomed in much further for the above image, right to the 135mm limit of my lens in fact. The steep eastern flank of Cairn Gorm had briefly emerged from the clouds and I loved the stand of trees with mist either side in the centre and thought the two together made for an interesting picture.

The above image took a little time and thought too. Initially I was attracted by the thin band of mist in the distance. But zooming in to 135mm produced the image below. I like the mist but there's too much of the less interesting background and not enough foreground.

It works better cropped to a panorama which puts more emphasis on the mist though I'm still not convinced by the background.

I pulled the zoom in for the next image (to 51mm) I like the rather ghostly aspens but the centre is too dark. I can lighten it of course but then the trees look too flat and dull.

Finally I looked at the scene more closely and decided to concentrate on the immediate foreground and to include the rock and the bracken. I liked the contrast between the sunlit oak tree and the lichen covered leafless birch tree in shadow. Finally I had a compostion that worked for me.