Guardians of Tranquility

In addition to providing a soft peaceful mood, fog has a wonderful way of imparting an element of depth to an image, especially in black & white where the tonal range of the gray scale becomes a proxy for distance. My home base, Santa Barbara, being situated on the Pacific coast gets a lot of fog throughout the year. Technically, the fog is a marine layer, so named because it originates at sea and drifts inward driven by offshore winds. Usually, the visibility at ground level is not severely impaired, but occasionally a dense ground fog occurs that can transform a landscape into a magical visual experience.  I recently had the good fortune to capture a sequence of such ground fogs over a period of the last few months.  The site I chose was our local cemetery, which is located on a hill overlooking the ocean. It is a unique setting for another reason which is that it contains a remarkable collection of trees, some of which are native to this area, such as Coast Live Oaks, Douglas Fir, & Monterey Cypress, as well as many exotic species from other countries, including Himalayan Cedars, Norfolk Island Pines, & Canary Island Date Palms. These majestic sentinels add a special quality to the landscape as they stand guard over this tranquil setting.

Ten of these images were published in the December 2021 issue of LensWork, a Magazine that features photography and the Creative Process.