An eerie misty morning

How a misty misery morning lead to a nice shot!

Misty morning on Estate Clingendael, The Hague in 2015

This picture was shot in my hometown The Hague in October 2015. We visited the estate Clingendael and strolled some more kilometers through the park to shoot some pictures from the forest in the mist.
That day, there was a thick mist over The Netherlands giving an eerie feeling. I wanted to photograph the mist in a forest or park and this was a great opportunity for that. I had a particular photo in my mind where the rays of the sun were seen through the leaf cover.
Due to the fact that the mist was so thick and higher than expected, the sun was not able to peek through the clouds at all. It was just a misery morning. However, having a stroll through the park always is nice and a few shots were made of which this is one.

Due to the idea I had in mind, I took my wide angle lens with me. With that one I could capture the widest photo’s possible. Almost at the end of our walk, we came by a little pond. I thought that that place would be great to create an HDR photo, using three different exposures. In the end, I only used one of the exposures because there were too much differences between the three shots. The raw file was really flat in colors, so I bumped the shadows up, adjusted the highlights down and fiddled around with the brightness and saturation settings. Perhaps this photo is now a bit over saturated, but in reality, the greens were really green and the cloud base was as it is on the photo. Next time I would have brought a tripod to make a long exposure, with the risk of loosing the details on the clouds.

The shot was impulsive, but the final result is showing the real situation, making it an eerie scene!

Camera settings:

Location