Fog Waves Are the Most Beautiful Thing I Captured After 8 Years of Experimenting | Hacker News Reader

Fog Waves Are the Most Beautiful Thing I Captured After 8 Years of Experimenting

boredpanda.com

202 pointsshawndumas22 comments

These images are beautiful.

They remind me of a few times when I’ve been able to see the patterns the wind creates, to visualise wind.

First up was strong winds in the desert, whipping sand off the dunes and creating patterns in the air.

Second was in Canada, during light snow fall. A thin layer of snow, dust like, was on the roads. And the cars / winds would whip it up to about 10 cm’s off the road. It enabled the visualisation of both the wind and the air being pushed around by cars and trucks. I found it mesmerising.

Usually it’s only visible through clouds, and it’s mostly static, unless the wind is incredibly strong.

Does anyone have other situations where they’ve been able to see wind? Or other usually invisible phenomena?

My office in midtown Manhattan gets reflected sunlight off an adjacent tower in golden hour this time of year. When conditions are just right that system somehow forms a Schlieren imaging system [0] and the variations in air density outside the window is projected on the wall above my desk.

My cofounder's gotten used to me flicking the lights off every time I notice the light lining up the right way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_imaging

I'm in the Seattle area. Every year in late spring, the cottonwood trees start emitting huge quantities of seeds attached to fluffy "cotton". It gathers in drifts on the road. The fluff is light enough to be tossed about by small eddy currents in the air, so you can see how house walls, arbors, fences, small trees affect the air movement. Fascinating, and something I look forward to yearly.

Nice. Reminds me I saw something similar in Melbourne once, when the pollen count was through the roof. But the wind was intensely strong, making it an all round horrible experience lol. I was obviously not in the right mindset to appreciate it.

On a sailboat in the snow. You can watch how the sails and wind interact.

If you think the images are beautiful, find a way to spend time on a small boat offshore. You see many many things as beautiful. The photos make me miss my time offshore.

"This is where I coined the term “Fog Waves”"

Nope. Sorry, Nick. Harold Gilliam has been publishing at least since '62 on the topic. "Fog Wave" can be easily found in the most recent scanned edition of his book, Weather of the San Francisco Bay Region: Second Edition, from 2002.[0] (no quick search reveals if the term is also in the '62 edition)

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=aaYwDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=P...

The film Baraka has great shots of moving fog in mountains: https://youtu.be/r6BJkLWivzY?t=1029

They are still my favorite nature shots. I'm remembering them when I remind myself that the planet has way more great stuff than what I see daily around me.

Stunning. I flew out of SFO yesterday morning and as we flew over the city, a thick white layer of fog covered everything except the very top of Sutro Tower. Very sublime, it looked like a cloud sea with blue skies above.

> cloud sea with blue skies above

https://vimeo.com/22439234

When I was a kid and on La Gomera, we rode a bus across the island to get to our ferry very early in the morning, over mountains on very windy roads, and seeing the sun rise above the clouds... well, it's my first memory of being moved in this deep yet light way (sublime is just the word) by something I saw in nature, and I shall never forget it :)

We play on the sea. When the weather is a bit grim you can see big clumps of misty rain come in on the wind. They look voluminous and heavy. But you get to be inside them. All swirly and wet.

Near my house we sometimes get a standing wave where the fog actually curls as it flows SSE over the spine of the peninsula / Sweeney Ridge.

It’s pretty amazing. I love the fog for some reason :P

That's beautiful. And I thought I was lucky to live in the hills above a river that usually has a trail of thick fog hugging it in the Fall and Spring.

At last, I know what Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is trying to capture.

>I do this by putting on dark filters known as ND or Neutral Density filters that trick the camera into thinking it’s night time forcing a longer shutter speed.

Author is knowledgeable enough about filters but can't figure out manual mode on his camera?

They just explained it oddly. ND filters reduces the amount of light so it is possible to do long exposures during the day. If they tried to use manual long exposure without ND, the photo would be fully white from all the light coming in.

Thanks for the explanation. I immediately assumed he was using a phone or something that similarly forced auto mode.

Please don't be rude here. The author clearly knows how to use manual. An ND filter allows you to set a long shutter speed without letting as much light hit the sensor. This allows you to capture motion without overexposing your shot.

Pretty sure he's jumping the mechanical explanation for the impact.

Just the wording struck me as odd, "trick the camera into thinking it’s night time forcing a longer shutter speed" seems to imply that he's using Auto and trying to "trick" a slow shutter speed... You shouldn't need to try to trick anything, just set the shutter speed to whatever you want. A filter is def useful for reducing the amount of light coming in though.

Don't get too hung up on words.

It's a common technique to use ND filters when capturing long exposure photos during the day. The scenario is that you know how long you want your exposure to be, for instance 5 seconds. And your problem is that those 5 seconds will flood your sensor with light. The solution is to use a ND filter.

At midday on a sunny day, by the sunny-16 rule you can expect to set the camera exposure to f/16 1/100 s at ISO 100. To get to even 1/50 s, you're now at f/22, the limit of most commercial lenses. So yes, ND filters are still useful to those of us who understand manual exposure.

Could you please review the site guidelines and follow them when posting here? That's harder than it sounds, but we all need to, to preserve this community. Included:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

"Snark is deprecated."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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