Photo Journal- Foggy Emeryville

I’ve been trying to take advantage of unique lighting and atmospheric conditions in order to push my photography. The Bay Area has a reputation for fogginess, but that’s not really true of the East Bay. So when we had a streak of foggy mornings a few weeks ago, I headed out with my camera to the Emeryville Marina.

In addition to finding creative times to shoot, the fog helped me get out of my comfort zone in terms of processing images, too. I usually gravitate toward building full value and color ranges in my photographs, so working on such a high-key, desaturated image still feels a little unnatural for me. However, the images that I pulled off my camera were dark, dull, and lifeless at first, not at all the silvery, dreamlike scene I’d witnessed. Eventually, I plan on experimenting with color grading and more obvious kinds of stylization in the future, but here, I was just aiming to capture the natural qualities I saw with my own eyes.

It’s important to remember that cameras are not the objective observers we often make them out to be. Our eyes are much more sensitive than any sensor or film, so we sometimes have to rely on our memories to tease out the qualities we originally saw when taking a picture.