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A friend of mine recent asked me if I had captured any images of the foggy mornings we seem to be having around here. I made a handful of excuses but the ultimate outcome was “No” I had not. 

Saturday morning I decided that I was going to get my but out of the house and bare the cool foggy morning. I have been watching a spot that I have been wanting to capture under the proper conditions. One of those conditions was Fog. 

My wife and I set out. She is such a trooper. I had been up for hours as usual. She gets up Saturday morning and I immediately hit her with “Let’s go shoot”. She doesn’t skip a beat, goes and gets dressed for the conditions (which by now she has learned it could mean anything with me when I’m in shooting mode) and asks one simple request, can I wait long enough that she can fix a to go cup of coffee. Of course I obliged and fixed myself one as well. 

We set out and literally can’t see 100 ft in front of the truck as we take some back roads to the spot I have visioned in my head. We always take the truck on our photography expeditions becuase we never know where we may end up.  We get to the spot early in the morning and as quietly as I can, I pull the truck off on an entrance to a field beside the farm workers house. After all, I will be treaspassing and I don’t want to alert the natives so to speak. I get the shots that I had stored up in my head and as usual they did not turn out exactly like I had pictured. Not saying they were bad shots by any means, but I wasn’t crazy about them just the same. 

Heading back to the truck I notice in the field adjacent to us, a cattle feeder that I can just barely see through the fog. I also notice some black outlined figures standing around said cattle feeder. Off I go, gingerly stepping over the electric fence and into the seemingly endless pasture. I am stepping very deliberately to dodge the cow patties while approching the black angus gathered around the feeder. Damn! I have been spotted. The lookout alerts the others and they are all watching me now. I take a couple of shots, still approaching slowly when I hear this female voice with a British accent break the erie silence of the morning. 

Startled and assuming I have been busted for my treaspass, I imediately look to see where my wife is at. Wait, a British accent? I am doubtfull that the family that own this farm and have so for as long as I can remember are recent transplants from the other side of the big pond. I slowly turn a 180 and spot a group of bicyclists coming up the road. Their amazement with the fog is as strong as mine as I listen to them discuss it as they ride. I raise my camera up and take the first shot of them and when I ready for the next shot my camera doesn’t respond. I check and I have no power. It’s that darn battery that I have suspected for quite some time as being faulty, why did I leave that thing in the camera !! I quickly swap the location of the two batteries in my battery grip, power the camera on and fire another shot. After the second shot, thats it, my camera is dead. A feeling of dispare comes over me because I know that was probably a once in a life time shot. I can’t even check my cameras lcd screen since I have no power.

Cutting my losses, head hanging low, I locate my wife and we make the walk of shame back to the truck. I quickly give the faulty battery an improper burial as if this will be any restitution for it failing me. I load up some new batteries and think desparately of another place to capture some more shots of the fog. I can’t bare to look and see if the one good shot I took was a keeper. I need to set my mind on the next location or I might as well go back to the house and wallow in my disappointment. This is not an artists best moment.

We continued on and captured a few more decent shots and various locations. To put this in perspective, I may have taken 25-30 shots this morning and I’m not feeling very inspired by any of them.

We return home and I put the memory card (an ironic term for such a device) and start uploading the photos to my computer. We got cleaned up, ate some breakfast and I sit down at my computer not exactly excited about this mornings shoot. My wife normally stands here beside me as I take the first pass over the shots of the day. She was finishing up in the kitchen while I am browsing the shots and I see the thumbnails of the cyclists. I can tell from the small preliminary images that only one of them has any chance of being a keeper.  I purposely do not look at my monitor when clicking on the image to enlarge it. 

I open my eyes after a couple of seconds with anticipation of the image on the screen. Remember, I have seen this image with my own eyes before I took the shot. I have that image in my head as I open my eyes. 

The shot is exactly like the image in my head as I took it. I rarely like any of my own work but I am truly satisfied with what I have captured. If you look closely, you can see the British woman pointing at something looming in the fog to show her fellow riders.  

-Jerry Mumma

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