I decided to work a half day on New Year’s Eve, 2009, and that morning woke up to the first nice winter fog we’ve had in Houston. I drove by Lake Woodlands, and decided it would be worth stopping for a few minutes to take some pictures. The water was like glass. A few members of the Woodlands Rowing club were out on the water in their skulls working up a sweat. Birds calmly flew around. The quiet during these heavy fogs is amazing. I felt as if I could hear somebody sneeze from a half mile away.

The newer digital cameras are inexorably pulling away from the capabilities of traditional film for night photography. Particularly if you shoot in color, the ability of digital cameras to properly color balance all the artificial light sources is a huge advantage in using digital for taking nighttime photographs. The super-sensitive sensors now available on even very small cameras give us the ability to walk around with no tripod and take some very high quality photos that contain very little objectionable noise (digital grain). Here are a few photos I took with a GF1 at ISO 1600. All of them are handheld, and all were exposed using the manual exposure setting on my camera.