The Moment You Almost Drive Past
The fog was thick, and my plan was set.
After photographing the Alster River in my previous post, I wanted to explore it a little further. With the dense fog covering the landscape, I was hoping it might give me a few atmospheric images to bring home.
But things rarely go exactly as planned.
When I arrived at the river, I quickly realised that reaching the water was going to be far more difficult than I had imagined. Thick vegetation made the river almost impossible to access, and there were very few places where the landscape opened up enough to photograph.
To make matters worse, the fog that had been so thick everywhere else had completely disappeared around the river.
After a rather brutal walk through dense undergrowth, I finally admitted defeat. The plan was abandoned, the camera went back in the bag, and I started heading home.
And then it happened.
On the way back, I passed a field scattered with hay bales.
I drove past them.
But something made me slow down.
You know that feeling when you see something out of the corner of your eye and, almost before you've had time to think, something inside you says:
“Wait… go back.”
I drove a little further before turning the car around.
The hay bales were sitting quietly in the morning light, surrounded by the remnants of the fog. Nothing spectacular had happened. No dramatic landscape. No extraordinary weather. Just an ordinary field that, for a brief moment, looked completely different.
Those are some of my favourite moments in photography.
Not the photographs you set out to take, but the ones you almost drive past.
The ones that suddenly make you stop, turn around and grab the camera because something just feels right.
This became the image I had been looking for that morning.
I still can't decide whether the colour or the black-and-white version captures the mood best. I like them both, which actually makes me quite happy. I find black-and-white photography surprisingly difficult to get right, so whenever an image works in both colour and monochrome, it feels like a small victory.
In the end, the fog, the river and the carefully planned morning all turned out to be irrelevant.
The photograph was waiting for me on the way home.
