200MM Full-moon Foggy Landscape Photography | A Surprising Hiking Adventure

Hello everyone and welcome to the beautiful city of Pacifica here in California and I am about to embark on a little journey here to see if we can get above the fog. I wanted to go for a nice hike today and I also felt compelled to take some fog photography so I figure this is the perfect combination of the two things that I really enjoy doing. So we're gonna try and hike all the way up this ridge right here to see if we can get above the fog bank. If we can't well it'll still be a really nice adventure. I'm sure we'll find you know some interesting things to look at but if we can get above the fog it is going to be spectacular. I'm going to also show you my very lightweight photography and hiking kit that I use for these adventures so yeah really hope you enjoy and let's get started. Little did I know this hike would not go as planned but it did end up producing one of my favorite shoots of the year. Well one of the benefits to these mountain hikes when you start out at the ocean or close to sea level is you're usually hiking up on the way there, get the hard work out of the way, and then on the way back you get a nice chill walk down the mountain. We're already getting some amazing views in that direction. I think it's going to be even better when we get on top of the mountain. All right so I couldn't help myself I did snap a few quick shots on the way up and here's how they turned out. Well we are almost to the top of the ridge. I think just right past this little area we should be getting to the top. You can kind of see where the ridge ends here. The fog bank has kind of pushed to the south a bit. I'm gonna walk along the ridge to the south and hopefully that gets us closer but I really have no idea what this is gonna look like. Usually I have a better idea of what the fog is gonna do once I'm almost up the mountain but right now it's a bit of a mystery so we'll just have to see. Once I got to the top of the ridge the views were absolutely incredible. All right so we are on top of the mountain. It is very very windy in typical bay area fashion. I found kind of an interesting perspective to focus on with the fog bank out there in the distance and the way the fog is coming in is creating some beautiful light. So let me show you what we're working with here. All right so check that out. So this is at about 28 millimeters and if I zoom in here look at those beams of light out to sea. They are really cool. So yeah I love this composition with this sort of v-shape that leads to the tree right there or I could zoom in even further get a perspective like this or even just focusing on the water itself underexposed. That's a beautiful abstract pattern. So kind of playing around with this seeing what we can do for my settings. You know I'm just keeping it pretty simple here ISO 100 f8. The main priority here is to make sure we're getting all of that highlight detail. I don't want any of those specular highlights on the water to be blown out. I want to make sure those are nice and crisp so I'm kind of underexposing the shot a bit. That's so cool. I really loved how this image turned out with that billowing cloud right in the middle and those gorgeous beams of light on the water. It definitely wasn't what I expected to capture up here but ended up being a really nice surprise and little did I know towards the end of my shoot I would get an even bigger surprise. All right well the further down this ridge I've gone the windier it's gotten and also that fog bank that I was chasing is really high up right now. I mean I think it might be another thousand feet above me so there's no way I'm getting above the fog today. So mother nature this time has fooled me. I'm still confident we can find some interesting things to maybe take pictures of so I'm just walking further down the ridge looking and like where that bank is coming over it must be so so windy because I'm watching the cloud just kind of like morph into all these shapes. It's moving really fast. It's pretty amazing to watch. Here's a quick time lapse of what that looks like. I can go down this path. There is a tree that I'm looking at right now that looks really cool. Here check check this out. Look at that tree right there. That is a really cool shaped tree. I wonder if we can get closer to it and get a composition. We're never gonna know unless we try so I'm gonna head down there and see if there's a way to compose the tree with maybe the cloud bank out in the distance. This reminds me of the ancient bristle cones out in eastern California but the only problem with this tree is it's not very isolated as you can see by all the other trees surrounding it. I do wish it was a little bit more simple but let me show you what I'm composing here. I do actually kind of like this composition where you get the tree and then some of these smaller ones to the left side. Now the other thing I could do here which could be interesting is zooming in and seeing if we could isolate some of these curved patterns. Oh and I see the clouds are starting to swirl around. The birds are starting to fly. Oh there's a hawk up there too. We'll see what we can capture. So here's a shot of the tree taken a bit further back so I could include the fog bank and what I really loved here is how the tree leans to the left side and then the fog makes the opposite shape arcing up to the top right. I felt like those diagonal lines really helped to balance out the composition. Since I was facing away from the sun I didn't have to do any exposure blending here. I also made sure to bump my ISO and use a fairly high shutter speed to compensate for the wind blowing in the trees. I noticed a gorgeous full moon rising from the left side and realized if I quickly rushed down to the right side of the trail I could align it perfectly with this gnarled tree. Okay so this is amazing. I was able to get the moon right in between this tree. Look at how cool that is. The moon is right there. The birds have been flying around and depending on where I stand I could place the moon in different positions different parts of the branches and I just love that fog swirling in creating all these different shapes. For this I am shooting everything handheld really fast shutter speed ISO 500. Everything that I'm shooting is out in infinity but man what an incredible surprise this was. I had no idea. I gotta be honest with you when I saw that fog bank was really high I got very close to just heading right down the ridge and then I found the tree and then the moon came out and it's like something out of a fairy tale. It is so cool how that fog is swirling in and just kind of covering up a bit to the moon for a second. The birds are flying in. One of the challenging things about shooting moonrises is how fast that moon can move which can remove your alignment pretty quickly. Luckily in this case I was able to compensate for that by just moving myself a few feet in different directions. This also allowed me to place the moon in different parts of the tree so I experimented a bit and shot as many variations as I could with those birds gliding around. The other thing that really helped this moon shoot was having the moon rise during sunset and twilight instead of at night because if you've ever tried to shoot the moon at night you'll notice it's so much brighter than the rest of the landscape which means you either need to do a pretty extreme silhouette or you have to bracket multiple shots and blend them together to get dynamic range for the moon and the rest of the scene. But in this case since it was still pretty light out I was able to do these in one single exposure. And now I'd love to hear from you. Which of these moon images ended up being your favorite? Do you like these wider scenes with the moon up top and more of that sky gradient? The moon positioned right in the middle of these branches? Or this final image with the darker light and the moon on the right side? Please let me know in the comments. Earlier in the day I sat down to cover all of the hiking gear and camera gear that I brought on this adventure including my favorite lens that I use to shoot all of these images. Well I found a lovely little spot in here to kind of sit down for a second take a break. So right here I've got this uh little hiking bag. This is about the most average hiking bag you could ever have. Teton Sports. Works out pretty well. You can see here I do have a tripod. This one's by Leo Photo. This is the 224C. It is very very small. I used to have the Siru brand one that was kind of the equivalent but that one snapped on me. So I do not use it anymore. But this is perfect. Gives enough stability. It's so lightweight and portable that it barely feels like I actually have a tripod with me. Sunscreen. Always got to have sunscreen. Some filters. These are the Case Magnetic filters. And with me I've got a classic combination of ND64, ND1000, and then a CPL. I have some snacks. I'm always carrying snacks when I'm hiking. Got some protein bars. Little calorie snacks that work well. These are some I think they're broad beans. They're pretty good. You want like calorie dense food too. Like stuff that's going to be high calorie but really compact. I have the, these are shorts that I've got on but I've got the pant legs to turn them into pants if I need to. I have a jacket in here. If you ever hike in the Bay Area it'll be like the nicest day ever and in 10 minutes it could be super windy, super cold. And then the star of the show, the camera. So I'm using just my standard Sony A1 that I use for everything. The lens is kind of the main thing to talk about here I think. I wanted a lens that does a little bit of everything and so far for me my favorite lens for that is the Tamron 28-200mm. This gets me pretty wide so I can do a decent amount of wide angle shots. If I need to go a little wider maybe I'll do a panorama. And then this gets me to 200mm so I can do those shots that focus on little details in the distance. This kit is the perfect compromise. While I can still do everything I need to do, I can shoot video, I can shoot time lapse, I can shoot landscape photography but I don't feel burdened by the extra gear. All right you guys, well as you can see it's getting pretty dark and I'm gonna walk along the ridge for a bit and start making my descent down the hill. I forgot to mention this, I always have a headlamp in my camera bag, super important to have especially if you're going to be hiking in the dark. An amazing day out here, really spontaneous. We didn't photograph any of the things I thought we would photograph. Those are the best kind of days, the ones that just kind of take you by surprise. And I'm really excited to see how these shots turned out. Now I did manage to get a bit of low fog on another ridge a few days later. I used the exact same setup and then I captured these. Hope you enjoyed this video. If you did enjoy it, please give it a thumbs up and consider subscribing to the channel for more. And if you want to learn more from me, you can check out my workshop page on my website. And yeah, I'll catch you in the next one.