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Incoming Summer Fog

Posted by Don Smith (California, United States) on 11 August 2008 in Landscape & Rural.

This is a typical July scene near my home in southern Santa Clara Valley, California. I have been wantiing to capture the wildness of early evening fog being literally "sucked" in off the Pacific Ocean by hot temperatures in the San Juaquin Valley. This "ebb and flow" of weather occurs in the summer months when hot air in the great Central Valley serves as a vacuum to pull the moist fog in off the Pacific Ocean. The locals call it, "our built-in air conditioner!" I shot this particular scene near the Mission town of San Juan Bautista in the Gabilan Mountain Range. I bracketed 4 frames and tried to combine them in Photomatix Pro 3.0; however, this is one of those instances when HDR did not work, thus I had to do it "the old-fashioned way" by converting each image in Adobe Camera RAW, then combining each image in Photoshoip CS3 using layer masks. It took about 20 minutes for this image. I saved the combined images, flattened them, then reopened the file in ACR to add some final tweaks to the image. Hopefully I've succeeded in conveying the feeling of "a wall of fog" pouring through the hills! To see more of my "Rural Landscapes," please visit my website at http://www.donsmithphotography.com
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Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III
1/50 second
F/8.0
ISO 400
70 mm

summer
california
fog