I’m not sure if this third photo in my series of images taken on an extraordinarily foggy afternoon, while walking around Holmes Lake in Lincoln, Nebraska, with my family, my brother, his wife, and his two dogs, adequately conveys just how intense the ground-level cloud cover was, but if not, then, I’m not sure what actually could. This is on the west side of the lake, with the crushed limestone footpath on top of the dam literally disappearing into the distance under the sheer weight of the fog. There’s no AI image-generation here, no camera tricks, no special exposure techniques. It really did look just like you see here. (Well, with one slight exception: I did use the AI Removal tool in Lightroom to get rid of a few minor distractions like a stick on the path and a small metal pole on the left.)
I shot this with my Nikon D750 and 50mm f/1.8 lens, having switched back to the good ol’ Nifty Fifty after taking last week’s close-up shot of a cattail covered in condensation. The 50 isn’t exactly a wide-angle landscape lens, but it’s the only other lens I had with me and, when paired with a full-frame camera, it can work really well even outdoors. It certainly did here, anyway. I shot this at f/4, focused midway down the path, and auto-ISO chose a shutter of 1/180 and ISO 100. Not bad at all.
More than anything, I think this image really succeeds in capturing some more esoteric elements of photography: mood, feeling, emotion, perhaps even a sense of foreboding or uncertainty. It’s also a little unclear just what is going on here, with a path leading straight to the horizon, clouds on either side, and a haze off in the distance completely obscuring almost any recognizable objects. It might seem almost like a scene out of the Frank Darabont movie The Mist, but in real life. I’m not sure that was my goal when I took it initially, since mostly the six of us were too busy being stunned at the sight we were witnessing for me to think about capturing anything more than cool photos of the fog-covered lake, but the more I looked at it afterwards in Lightroom the more it kind of took on a life of its own.
Even as I write about this picture I’m kind of at a loss for words, because I’m not really sure what I can say that adequately expresses what I feel when I look at it. Hope? Trepidation? Uncertainty? A sense of standing on the edge of a precipice? If you were to visit this exact spot on pretty much any other day, I don’t think you would find it remarkable at all. It’s just a normal lake in the middle of a normal town in Nebraska. And yet, it’s something else entirely when wrapped completely in fog. So I’ll just leave it at that, and invite you to share your
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