P#27: A Surreal Photograph of a Mysterious Misty Sunrise

The Right Place, the Right Time

Brenda Tharp: This picture of a misty sunrise has to do with using atmospheric conditions to add great light and to create a more expressive picture. If you go out for sunrise, especially during the fall season when the temperatures are changing, you'll find so many ponds with mist rising off of them in the predawn light. (click the image for a larger version)

It creates this wonderful opportunity to capture the mood of this pond and the mood of the morning, and so I go out a lot and look for fog and rising mists. In the fall season, I can almost find them anywhere.

It depends on where you are in the country, but I would say in general from September through November is typically when you're going to find the change in the air temperature versus the water temperature. It creates the opportunity to capture these misty, moody scenes like this.

Audri Lanford: This is so beautiful. It really is. You feel like you're there.

Brenda Tharp: Thank you. That's what I was trying to do -- create a feeling of being there. You'll notice at the bottom of the picture that there are some grasses that sort of create a fringed border. I deliberately included those.

A lot of times when people are out working in nature, they'll look at that and try to just go for a picture of the pond with the mist rising. There's nothing wrong with that picture, but if you want to put the viewer there, by having the grasses right in the foreground, it almost creates the effect that the viewer is standing right there and the grasses are separating them from the scene beyond.

Audri Lanford: Was this taken with more of a wide angle lens?

Brenda Tharp: It wasn't necessarily that wide on this one. I'm guessing I was somewhere around 35mm focal length, so it's not extremely wide but it was enough to allow me to get the depth of field so that those grasses would be sharp in the foreground. I felt like they needed to be.

To Sum Up

You can't just show up to any old pond on any day at any time and hope to get a shot like this. Conditions have to be right. Brenda Tharp explains that timing her misty sunrise photo on a fall morning at dawn, allowed her to get a shot that really brings the mood of the moment to the people who look at it.