Out of the Fog
It was late in the afternoon when Gary Braasch drove through a band of dense fog in Ecola State Park, on the Oregon Coast. "As I came out the other side, the edge of the fog was just thin enough to let the sunbeams come through," he says. "I could have moved back toward the fog, or left the fog entirely, so in a sense I had control over the landscape, which is very rare." At that point, he began looking for two things to make the composition.
"I needed to find a place where the sunbeams were very prominent, and it was important to have something in the foreground. I went racing around, up and down the hill and along the road, until I found a spot where I saw the sun was hitting a bush and the lichens and ferns on the ground, and that became the shot." He used his tripod-mounted F100 and 17-35mm f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S Zoom-Nikkor.
"I zoomed in a little bit, probably to about 24mm and framed the shot. I tried to get a sort of boundary on the shot with the trees that are silhouetted on the edges, and then it was just a matter of exposure. Considering I had sunlight on one part of the picture, I used the camera's spotmeter on the ferns in the foreground to get my basic exposure, then bracketed a little because there was such a wide range of values in the picture."
