The Shape of What Isn’t There: Working With Mist and Fog

Mist has a way of remaking the familiar. A lane you have walked many times becomes a corridor of soft uncertainty, its edges dissolved and its distances rearranged. Sound changes first, with footsteps muted and birdsong closer than it should be, and then colour follows, reduced to a quiet palette of greys and diluted greens. In that softened world, the eye slows. It stops scanning for detail and starts noticing shape, temperature, and the way light behaves when it has to push through something that is not quite air.

Fog is an editor long before you are. It removes the unnecessary, pares the landscape back to its essential lines, and leaves you with a scene that feels both honest and dreamlike. What remains is often more revealing than what has been obscured: a single tree holding its ground, a fence line dissolving into nothing, a harbour buoy glowing like a small act of defiance. In these moments, the camera becomes less a recorder of detail and more a witness to atmosphere, a tool for catching the world mid whisper.

There is also a kind of emotional fidelity in mist that is hard to find elsewhere. It slows the pace of looking, invites a gentler attention, and turns the ordinary into something symbolic. A field becomes a memory. A shoreline becomes a threshold. Even the simplest objects, such as a gate, a path, or a lone figure, carry a weight they do not possess in clear light. Fog does not just soften the world; it asks you to meet it with a different kind of presence.

Across Scotland and the south of England, mist behaves differently but speaks the same language. Highland mist feels ancient, rising from peat and water, thick enough to hold its own silence. Coastal mist in the south is lighter, salt softened, often luminous rather than heavy. Both offer the same invitation: to see less, and in doing so, to see more.

What do you think?