The Weather You're Avoiding Is the Photograph

Fog: subtraction as composition

Fog does the hardest part of composition for you. It removes the background, separates planes by distance, and reduces a cluttered scene to a few shapes.

The technical points that matter:

• Overexpose. Your meter sees a bright, low-contrast scene and pulls it toward grey. Add one to two stops or the fog renders as dirty dishwater.
• Find something close. Fog images need an anchor with detail and contrast in the front third — a tree, a figure, a fence post. Without it the frame is a grey rectangle.
• Shoot into the light, carefully. Backlit fog gives you visible light shafts. Side lighting gives you depth. Front lighting gives you nothing.

When to find it: radiation fog forms on clear, calm nights when the ground cools — so the forecast to look for is clear overnight, light wind, high humidity, and a large gap between temperature and dew point closing before dawn. Valleys and water. It burns off within two hours of sunrise, so this is a pre-dawn commitment.

Fog is the only weather condition that improves a mediocre location. It is worth setting an alarm for in a way that a sunrise is not.

Rain: the wet surface is the subject

Rain itself photographs poorly — individual drops are invisible unless backlit against something dark. What photographs superbly is what rain does to surfaces.

Wet asphalt becomes a mirror. Cobbles pick up every light in a street. Colours saturate by a stop. Reflections double every neon sign and lit window, which is why the best city photographs in existence were mostly taken in the rain.

Practical: shoot low, because reflections need a shallow angle. Get the lens hood on to keep drops off the front element. Carry a microfibre cloth in a pocket, not in the bag, because you will need it every ninety seconds and will stop bothering if it is awkward to reach.

Overcast: the giant softbox, used correctly

Flat white sky is the condition people complain about most and it is genuinely excellent for two things: portraits, because the light is soft and directionless with no harsh shadows; and detail work — forests, waterfalls, texture, anything where the contrast range of direct sun would be unmanageable.

The rule: exclude the sky. An overcast sky has no information in it. Compose so it is out of frame entirely, or reduced to a thin band. Most disappointing overcast photographs are 40% blank white at the top.

Snow: the exposure trap

Same metering problem as fog, more severe. A snow scene will be underexposed by one and a half to two stops by any automatic mode, producing grey snow.

Add exposure compensation and check the histogram — snow should sit hard against the right side without clipping. And set white balance manually, because auto will neutralise the blue in shadowed snow, and that blue is what makes snow photographs read as cold.

Storms, and where the limit is

The most dramatic light in landscape photography happens at the edges of a storm — the moment it clears, or the shaft of sun under a departing front. This is real and worth chasing.

The limits are also real. Lightning within earshot means you go inside, and a tripod on an exposed ridge is a lightning rod you are holding. Coastal storm photography kills people every year, almost always because they stood on a sea wall to photograph a wave and could not judge the largest one in the set.

No frame is worth this and the good photographers all say the same thing about it.

How to plan for bad weather

Two habits that changed my hit rate:

Read the forecast for transitions, not conditions. The valuable information is not "rain" — it is "rain clearing at 16:00," because the twenty minutes after a front passes is when the light does something.

Go out anyway. The single largest factor separating photographers with distinctive weather images from those without is that the first group left the accommodation when the second group did not.