Fun With Fog

Winter often brings foggy conditions to the valleys here in western Montana. I explain the phenomenon, describe some of the interesting shooting conditions I encounter in the fog, and show a few examples in my January article on my Web site. The photo of the wheel-line irrigator in the fog intrigues me. I made the picture just a few days ago, and spent some time working on it in Photoshop to enhance the contrast a bit in the foreground metal while letting the distant parts remain ephemeral. The picture is a good candidate for a frame and mat I have on-hand, so I decided to make a print.

The mat opening is about 15.75 inches wide x 8 inches high (40 x 20 cm). I made the print about half an inch larger than that in both dimensions. This forced me to crop a large area from the top of the frame. Creatively, that worked out well, since much of that area added nothing to the photo.

I cut a 17x22 inch (US C) sheet of EEF in half. Unlike the problem I mentioned in a 1 November, 2012, posting, I had no trouble with the paper curling this time.

I printed a nozzle check, as usual, and found VM completely missing. VM is paired with C. Both of these ink cartridges have been showing 1% for a very long time. I put new cartridges in the 7900, and then initiated a standard pair cleaning. That solved the problem. I returned the 1% cartridges to the machine.

Because the end margins would be narrow and would probably clip if I fed the sheet in the normal way, I made a custom sheet size in the driver, 17x11 inches. I fed the wide end of the sheet into the printer, and then set up the print job as usual, using portrait (vertical) orientation. The print looks fine-nice detail in the hoar-frost on the close metal section, with the detail fading away in the distance. If you're counting, there are nine wheels visible on the irrigator before it disappears completely in the fog. The print has wide top and bottom margins, with fairly narrow margins left and right. Feeding the sheet the "wrong" way allowed for those narrow end margins without clipping.

  --Jay