Fogging Your Lens for Visual Impact

There's a great little trick that you can use with your camera, which enables you to go light because you don't have to carry a filter for it. It's a very simple technique of being able to just fog your lens to get a softening effect, and use it to kind of have your subject matter glow. And it's as simple as pie 'cause all you have to do is this. And I get a glow across my lens. And as my breath evaporates over the lens, it becomes sharper and sharper again.

Where a technique like this really becomes important, it actually it works better in the fall. Today, we got a day, it's about 95 degrees outside. And so, it's evaporating almost instantly. So it's more difficult to get. But you can use this technique to help tell a story.

If you look at this photograph here of this coneflower, I've got a purple coneflower here. If I come in really tight on the coneflower, I can shoot just the coneflower. And that actually is kind of nice all by itself. And I can get it. But if I wanted to pull back a little bit, I've got some other coneflowers over here that are already starting to get a little brown.

So, you say, well, this technique is useful in a shot like that because it evaporates at different levels. And if I blow on my lens on this side, it's thicker on this side than it is in the other. So I can actually use that breath to fog this out and let this come in sharp first and still have that blown out. So it becomes somewhat of a diffusion process in camera. And so, it just simplify things that when you're out and you're out shooting and you see something like that, this is a technique that you can use really quickly and not have to bring a diffusing filter or wait until you go into post-processing and use Gaussian blur, layers, and all of these things that which you can also accomplish the same goal.

Here, you can do it right in the field while you're out. Now, if you look at this photograph I took in Finland of these guys taking a sauna. And they're out taking a sauna, I've got this window that's blasting out. And as that window's blasting out, it didn't offer me any new information as far as heat, and moisture, and humidity. So while in there, in order to add a little bit of flavor to that shot, I just blew on the lens, grabbed the shot.

My guys are still in focus, but the window now is blown out. And somehow it's been able to increase the sense of heat, and steam, and searing temperatures inside here. So it added to the picture. So, it's not only something that's free, but it's something that's useful as well. So we moved over from the coneflower because it's just too hot.

It's in the 90s today. And unfortunately, I don't have enough hot air, that's debatable, to get enough fog on my lens to last more than a split second. So, what I've done is I've moved out of the sun into the shade, where in the back of the farm here now, we've got a couple of trikes that are parked out here and a barn, which is gonna work great because now I've got a wide-angle lens and I can get more breath on it quickly. And the nice thing is that I'm gonna be able to control this. I've got some sky, but I'm using some trees, all the things that you need to know that make good photographs.

I'm using some of the trees to block out this hot humid sky. And I'm gonna be able to blow on the wide-angle lens, which is going to give me this feeling that it's a foggy morning in the fall as opposed to a hot and humid day in the summer. And one of the keys when you're doing this is treat the fog that you're putting over your lens like reflective water. Your autofocus is not going to work in it. So you want to make sure that you turn your focus on manual so you can physically do that.

Otherwise, as it evaporates, the focus is gonna keep trying to find it. And by the time it's done evaporating, you've lost your fog. So be aware of that as well, okay. So let's get a couple shots here to show this and I've got a nice clean shot of the bikes I'm using the trees, just typically like you would in any other scene to block out some of that really, really bright sky. And here's the other thing is that I kind of want these trikes, 'cause they're so cool-looking, to be sharp.

So, I've got a wide-angle lens on so I'm gonna blow on just the top of the lens first. So it'll be thicker breath there. So I'll get greater fog at the top, less fog at the bottom. So, just like a filter or polarizer, moving it around, you can also control the fog with your breath. So I'm just gonna do the top of the lens.

There it is. I've got fog at the top and it's clear at the bottom. Now, let's just do one where it's, everything is foggy. It has a really cool feel. Now it's evaporating and I'm watching it as it evaporates.

I keep shooting until she's sharp again. We're all done. We got a variety of shots. One frame, just a little hot air.