Rocks, Ocean Path, Acadia National Park, Maine, MMVIII
Acadia National Park’s spectacular views are sometimes obscured by thick fog in summer. Fog can have a very interesting effect on a subject for the open minded artist, generating a softly defined negative space. A spectacular example in Japanese Art is a set of folding screens by Hasegawa Tōhaku (1539-1610) depicting a pine forest in fog. Late in his life while living in a Buddhist monastery, Tōhaku portrayed these pine trees in washes of sumi ink rapidly fading from black to grey, with much of the paper left totally white.
Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees in Fog (松林図), 16th Century, Momoyama Period, Ink on Paper, right hand screen of pair of byōbu folding screens, Tōkyō National Museum (東京国立博物館).Japan.
In photography, fog results in an image emphasizing the foreground or the main subject and removes much detail from the background that might compete with the main subject in a fair weather photo. I shot these two pictures near the end of a hike with Lansing Wagner, as we walked down the Ocean Path down the eastern shore of Acadia the fog closed in, and the visible world became more intimate. We came upon a very cracked section of the pink granite that is the bedrock of Mount Desert Island, and the cracks seemed to converge toward one point. I tried to emphasize this convergence with the 45mm wide angle lens on my Bronica RF645, which exaggerated the perspective, and by splitting the composition into two frames I hoped to draw the viewer’s eyes in interesting ways into and around the composition. The bluish-grey lichens and green foliage provided subtle colors to contrast with the pink granite rocks in the print.
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