San Francisco photographer Nick Steinberg has climbed Mount Tamalpais hundreds of times for one subject, and it’s fog. From 2,572 feet up, the Marin County summit sits above the marine layer, and on the right evening the gray below stops looking like weather and starts behaving like an ocean.
He calls the results fog waves, a name he came up with himself. Ridges turn into reefs. Whole neighborhoods go under with their porch lights still on.
Quick facts
- Photographer: Nick Steinberg, San Francisco
- Where: Mount Tamalpais State Park, Marin County, California
- Elevation: 2,572 feet, above the fog on a good night
- Technique: Neutral density filters and exposures as long as two minutes
Why it looks like water
The smoothness is time. Steinberg puts neutral density filters over his lens and leaves the shutter open, sometimes for as long as two minutes. Every wisp that drifts through the frame in that stretch gets averaged into one silky surface. Your eye sees a slow churn. The camera sees a tide.
But the resemblance isn’t only a camera trick. Fog is cool, heavy air, and it runs downhill the way liquid does. When the marine layer sits at the right height, it pours over a ridgeline and down the far side like water slipping over a dam. The long exposure just lets you watch it happen.
Where all that fog comes from
Off the California coast, cold water wells up from the deep. Warm, damp Pacific air drifts across it, chills, and condenses into a low gray deck. Meanwhile the inland valleys bake, the hot air rises, and the coast gets pulled in through every gap in the hills to replace it. The Golden Gate is the biggest gap of all.
That’s why the Bay Area’s fog peaks in summer, and why locals know it well enough to have given it a name. They call it Karl!
The Fogaholics
Catching a wave takes more than showing up. If the fog rides too high, you’re standing inside it. Too low and it lies flat. It has to arrive at the right height and the right density, then bend around the terrain.
When Steinberg spoke to PetaPixel in 2016, he had already been at it for about eight years. He belongs to a group of around twenty photographers who call themselves the Fogaholics and trade weather updates day and night, so somebody is always ready to drive up the mountain.
There’s less of it than there used to be
A 2010 study from UC Berkeley, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that summer fog along this coast has dropped by about a third since 1901. It used to be present 56 percent of the time in summer. Now it’s 42 percent, which works out to roughly three fewer foggy hours a day.
The researchers couldn’t say whether natural cycles or a warming climate was behind it. What they could say is who feels it. The coast redwoods that grow in these same hills, Muir Woods among them, lean on summer fog to get through the dry months.
Our favorite is still the night frame near the top, the one with the houses in the trough. Somebody down there is making dinner with no idea they’re underwater.
Images © Nicholas Steinberg. See more of his Mount Tamalpais work on his website. For fog at its most extreme, read our piece on the foggiest place on Earth, and for more landscapes like these, our guide to natural wonders.
