Portraits in the Fog

So I've already told you about the relentless fog here this winter. The weekend before last Kristen and I decided to make the best of it and go for a hike up in the Carso despite the continued dreariness. The fog that weekend was a little less thick, which made the light much better for some photography. I figured it would be a good time to practice my portrait photography because the thin fog creates a nice diffused light, the kind of light you want for portraits. So up in the Carso we went, with me carrying my photo gear and Kristen looking pretty!

Here are a couple of shots of Kristen from our foggy hike.

This first one shows the rocky trails up in the Carso very nicely. We hiked from our house in Duino up over the first ridge into Slovenia; the border is only about 2 km from home. The hike takes you along old WWI trails and trenches passing many reminders of the war...this area was a major battle ground during WWI. We hiked up to the top of Monte Ermada, which was a place synonymous with death during the war because so many Italian soldiers died trying to hold the front there. It's really strange to hike in a place like this...where a war was fought. You think about it all the time because you're always passing old barracks and gun posts, and everywhere the rocks on the trials show scars from intense shelling. If you're a history buff our area is a very interesting place to hike.

OK, enough about the war. Well, almost enough. The wall that Kristen is posing in front of in this second shot is an old homestead that we suspect was bombed in WWI. The stone wall, constructed in a typical fashion here in the Carso, made for a nice background for a portrait. I like this one a lot. Kristen always manages to match the environment when we go for hikes for some reason! See how well her outfit fits in with the pink in the walls? She did match pretty nicely in the previous shot too don't you think? (I'll take some credit for seeing the backgrounds to put her in front of, but somehow she always seems to wear the right clothes for the habitat on our hikes).

This last portrait was shot by Kristen...nice job! As you can see by our smiles in all the portraits, we kind of got over the foggy doldrums that have prevailed this winter. I think maybe knowing that we are moving home this summer has helped!