Out of focus foreground foliage causing leaf haze or foliage fog is sometimes considered an unrecoverable death knell for a bird photo. This is especially the case if it results in an isolated bright green blob over part of the subject. These blobs are difficult to manage well in post processing especially if using differential layer masks on subject and background.

Foliage fog is however, something that I am actively looking for more and more. Something I discussed during my recent bird photography presentations at the PSNZ National Convention and expanded on at our 5 day NZ Photographyworkshops Wildlife Masterclass this past weekend was how intentionally managing contrast at capture and in processing is a crucial factor in image creation. Looking for ways to use foliage fog over all the image apart from the small area of importance is a tool to achieve this.

One our Masterclass venues is Orokonui Ecosanctuary and one of the goals there is to make images in the challenging low light, busy bush environment. This makes clean backgrounds difficult to find and an approach that works for me is to find small holes in foreground foliage to reveal the subject through. Micromovements as the bird moves keep the crucial head of the bird in clear view and the intervening out of focus leaves render a foliage fog that softens the contrast and reduces the distraction of the background while still revealing habitat context.

The korimako/bellbird image at the head of this post is an example of this approach. I challenge myself to make images during the workshop to illustrate the points we discuss and this image is one from this latest workshop. The only area sharp and contrasty is the head of the bird. Everything else is soft and low contrast, giving a sense of the habitat but without anything with visual weight to distract from the subject.

It is possible in some circumstances to use foliage fog over part of an image in a way similar to a linear gradient to reduce the visual weight of a distracting element. This next image of a kotare/kingfisher from Waipu in 2023 shows estuarine reeds and grasses being used to soften the contrast of the perch which would otherwise had a lot of visual weight in the image and been a distraction from the bird.

I wrote some years ago on using out of focus foreground elements as compositional tools and foliage fog is is really just an extension of that. Intentionally looking to for opportunities at capture to manage to contrast and visual weight of distractions can give us better starting points for image processing.

Photo with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 180-600mm f5.6-6.3