Cape Spear Lighthouse – Fog Off!

Walking through St. John’s, I kept noticing the phrase “Fog off” on mugs, T-shirts and all manner of other souvenirs. With the sun shining down on the colourful capital of Newfoundland, the slogan made no sense to me. That changed the very next day, when the entire Avalon Peninsula was swallowed by dense fog. Cape Spear, the easternmost point of Canada, was no exception, and you could barely see your hand in front of your face. Any hope of a view across the Atlantic, along the rugged coastline or even of icebergs drifting past was gone. Instead of something to look at, there was plenty to listen to. A foghorn bellowed, loud and piercing, warning sailors of the treacherous sea below. In the thick fog it was impossible to tell exactly where the sound was coming from, or whether it was one foghorn or several, or whether an echo was playing tricks on us. The whole scene was positively eerie. Fog off!

Photographing something you can barely see has its own challenges. I set up my tripod above the cliffs, from where I caught an interesting glimpse of the lighthouse for just a moment. Almost immediately the fog closed in again so thickly that even the beacon itself was no longer visible. From that point on, manual focusing was the only option, as the camera’s autofocus had become completely unreliable.

The foggy shots also presented me with unfamiliar questions when it came to post-processing. With landscape images I generally like to increase the contrast, and in particular the local contrast. Colour saturation usually gets a modest boost as well. Here, however, the task was to depart completely from my usual workflow and work the images soft rather than punchy.