Trees in Mist
On certain mornings in Hawke’s Bay, the fog settles over the valleys long before the first light breaks. The trees emerge from the blanket slowly, appearing initially as faint silhouettes before gaining form and revealing their finer details, standing in the mist like quiet punctuation in a sentence the landscape is still trying to write. These images were made from the vantage of the hills above, looking down across a world in the very process of becoming visible. The fog never truly obscures the land; it simply reveals it in an entirely different way.
Illumimated | Hawke's Bay
The Land’s Quiet Dreaming | Tukituki Valley, Hawke's Bay
Twins of Solitude | Hawke's Bay
The fog doesn't announce itself. You check the temperature the night before, look at the wind, make a guess. Sometimes you're wrong. But when the mist is sitting exactly where you hoped it would be, and the light is just beginning to separate the layers — there's nothing quite like it.
Mistbound Lines of Trees | Hawke's Bay
Order in the Mist | Hawke's Bay
Layers of Stillness | Hawke's Bay
Green Anchor | Waikato
These trees aren't extraordinary. They grow along fence lines, on the edges of paddocks, at the folds between hills. On a clear day you'd drive past without a second thought. The fog changes that. It isolates them, gives them weight, makes them the only thing in the world for a moment.
Trees in Fog | Tukituki Valley, Hawke's Bay
Trees in Foothill Fog | Hawke's Bay
Horses and Trees above the Mist | Hawke's Bay
I've been photographing this valley for years and it still surprises me. The same hills, the same trees — but the light never repeats itself exactly, and the fog never settles the same way twice. That's the thing about returning to a place. You think you know it. Then one morning it shows you something you've never seen before.
Tree and Morning Mist | Hawke's Bay
Bare Essentials | Hawke's Bay
Connected Perspectives
BY LOCATION
Explore the regional geography and specific local horizons that provided the canvas for these works:
BY NARRATIVE
Read the stories into the 'why' behind the work — the method, personal reflections and the journey:
Where the Fog Settles, the Print Endures
These mornings don't last. The fog lifts, the light moves on, and the valley returns to itself. A selection of images from Trees in Mist is available as archival fine art prints — made to hold the stillness of those early hours in a way a screen never quite can. If one of these mornings has stayed with you, it can stay with you properly.
