Today whilst looking out of the window at the fog and the golden light filled with promise, a couple of hours before sunset. I made a decision. I would abandon my work on the computer writing lectures, with which to share some of my accrued photographic knowledge with others, and grab my gear and go off and photograph something. But what would be my subject? One winter morning whilst driving into college, as I was working towards my final portfolio I glanced out of the window at a row of trees bordering a field, just off the M8. The early morning mist and vivid sunrise light made me feel slightly depressed. Why? Well because I had commitments and could not photograph the ephemeral scene. With the preconceived ideas and memories from that day I proceeded with my camera along the canal towards the area where I thought the trees were. Stumbling across frozen ploughed fields I reached the trees in plenty of time, which gave me the opportunity to assess the conditions. My heart sank as I began to realise that all hopes of warm sunset light faded like evanescence. As the temperature dropped the water vapour, which hung, heavy in the rapidly cooling air and condensed into eerie billowing clouds of dense fog dashing almost all hope of a sunset.
Bitter experience has taught me many a thing or two, not just about photography, but also about the natural world, and that the days when all hope is seemingly lost, the most amazing photographic conditions can develop with occasionally remarkable irony. I persisted and hung about like the mist in that frozen, dark brown field. I am not a religious person, well not in the classic sense anyway. In fact I’m generally highly pessimistic in that respect, but this day was different. I experienced conditions, which to a humble nature photographer were, what can is say, but almost spiritualistic in essence. Barely a hundred yards from a busy motorway, with its associated incessant hum of high-speed traffic as a background sound. I find that I cannot recall the noise at all. All of my senses were so absorbed in the images I was attempting to create, that I was totally shut off from it, and all else man-made. The elegance of the trees silhouetted against a vibrant pink sky, their branches ever so slightly softened by the fog were all that my mind could focus on.
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