A lifetime of Atlantic Canadian summers have taught me a very important lesson: sometimes there's fog. The scientific explanation, of course, is that the fog is created by the temperature differential between the warm land and the cold sea water. As the summer progresses, foggy days become less frequent because the water is warming up; June, though, is a time when an occasional foggy day just has to be expected. Since it's a natural phenomenon that just can't be controlled by the likes of me, the only thing to do is to find a way to embrace it and appreciate it.
I know it can be a disappointment to encounter fog at a vacation destination, and I don't particularly want to sound like Pollyanna, but accepting the fact that fog happens can help to take some of the sting out of reduced visibility. In other words, it's good to find some Zen. To me, fog is almost like a living thing; it swirls and sweeps and eddies, forming almost instantly on a changing breeze and disappearing almost as quickly. It creates an air of mystery and seems to change the contours of the familiar. It can form an all-encompassing blanket or drift in wisps on a sunlit shore. It's perhaps at is most playful around icebergs, forming and dissipating almost on a whim.
My camera is almost always at hand, and foggy days are often the ones when the camera gets the most use. There's something so fleeting and elusive about a bank of fog flowing like a wave over a headland or softening the contours of a rocky outcrop that it's hard to resist the urge to capture its unique and arresting beauty. The fog really is part of the adventure!
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