Not to be confused with Taylor Swift’s popular song, Purple Haze (it’s cool if you’re a Swifty, if you’ve seen my Spotify, you know), this week we’re taking a look at golden haze.  Over the course of the fall, myself and several of my friends have commented on the amount of haze we’ve had this year (as well as fog, which has been great!), and there have been more than a handful of times where I found myself shooting straight into the sun, yielding images that are almost entirely yellow – or at least more yellow than not.  I kept thinking it was interesting looking, but then never quite knew what to do with the images as stand-alones, so I decided to just share a small collection of them!

A little over a month ago, some friends of mine and I met up in middle Tennessee to go shoot together in Savage Gulf State Park and the surrounding area.  I hadn’t spent much time up there since working up there during college, so it was great to go back and experience it again.  For sunset, we decided to go over to The College of the South campus in Sewanee, where there is a giant cross, that has an amazing view off to the west (pictured above).  This particular sunset turned out to be the exact scenario I described above, and I thought added to the depth of the scene, making tree lines feel more like layers.

Below are a couple other images that illustrate these conditions as well, though these are from the Smokies.  In one case, I was shooting almost directly into the sun, and in the other, the sun was off to my right a bit, but was still illuminating the haze, as well as the hills in the foreground.  To me, these really make for different looking images!

More next week!

–Dan Thompson