6 tips for photographing fog and dew

Photo: Henk-Jan Hospes

Autumn is known for its beautiful colours and changeable weather, but fog and dew are also typical autumn phenomena. For many photographers, they’re the key ingredients for a beautiful autumn or landscape photo. But how do you best capture fog and dew? We share six tips for photographing these weather phenomena.

Tip 1: Protect your gear

Photo: Henk-Jan Hospes

Fog and dew often go hand in hand with cold mornings and lots of moisture. These aren’t the best conditions for your gear. It’s therefore wise to protect your equipment, for example by putting silica gel packs in your bag and drying everything thoroughly afterwards. It’s also advisable to let your gear acclimatise before taking it back into a warm living room. You can do this in a shed or your hallway.

Tip 2: Try a macro shot

When it’s foggy, there’s often no wind either. These are ideal conditions for a beautiful macro photo. Dewdrops on spider webs or plants are especially fun to photograph. You can use a macro lens for this, but you can also use a converter on your telephoto lens. That way you don’t need to buy a macro lens and can still take macro photos.

Tip 3: Overexpose your photo

Photo: Henk-Jan Hospes

A foggy landscape is, of course, very grey and bright. As a result, your photos may end up underexposed, with the fog looking greyish instead of white. You can prevent this by setting exposure compensation manually and slightly overexposing the photo. The fog then stays just as white in the photo as in real life, making the image far more interesting.

Tip 4: Keep an eye on the weather forecast

Photo: Henk-Jan Hospes

Fog forms when very humid air cools down, and it usually doesn’t linger for long. Good preparation is therefore essential. It’s handy to check the weather forecast for the next morning the evening before. That way you’ll know in advance how likely fog is. Buienradar even has a special visibility map that shows whether and where there’s fog.

Tip 5: Hide distracting elements

Photo: Henk-Jan Hospes

We all know that fog limits visibility. The thicker the fog, the less far you can see. A big advantage of dense fog is that it makes it much easier to hide distracting elements, such as buildings or a lamppost. This lets you shoot compositions that didn’t work before because something was in the way. Fog can also partly hide a distracting element, giving the photo a mysterious touch. You can see this clearly in the photo above, where the fence partly disappears.

Tip 6: Get up early

Photo: Henk-Jan Hospes

If you want to photograph fog and/or dew, it’s important to get up early, ideally well before sunrise. These are the moments when dewdrops still cling to spider webs and a white veil hangs over fields and landscapes. Once the sun rises, the fog often disappears quickly. Yet it’s precisely the sunrise that can add an extra dimension to your photo, especially when you’re shooting in a nature area. The combination of fog, sunlight and trees produces beautiful rays of light, also known as sunbeams or crepuscular rays.

Share your result

Many of the photos in this blog were taken by our ambassador Henk-Jan Hospes. A while ago we talked to him about his work as a landscape photographer. You can read that interview here. Have you also taken a beautiful photo of fog and dew? Share your photo with us for a chance to be featured on our Instagram account. Use the hashtag #KameraExpress or tag Kamera Express in your post. And don’t forget to follow us for plenty of inspiration.