Category: Washington

This is another beautiful green temperate rainforest image that I took last week while leading a private photography tour of Olympic National Park. This image is from the Sol Duc Valley on the way up to the iconic Sol Duc Falls. About 1/2 way to the falls is a very scenic little stream covered in green moss that is often photographed. About 3 winters ago, one of the big storms caused a terrible amount of flooding in the area, and a lot of the moss that covered the boulders was washed away. I was out there last year and did not even take a picture while leading a private workshop. This year, I decided to walk up hill to scout for better photo ops. A good 10-15 minutes above the bridge that crosses the stream, I found some much more pleasing mossy boulders than lower down and proceeded to spend several hours taking pictures.

This is my favorite image. This vine maple overhung a nice section of moss covered rocks and had some really cool delicate branches. Even though there was no wind blowing, this image was incredibly difficult to photograph as the leaves were ever so gently bouncing, making long exposures blurry. I was trying for the largest depth of field possible by shooting within 2 feet of the foreground leaves while trying not to fall into the stream on the slippery rocks. I finally got one image while shooting at f16, 3.2 sec, and ISO 400. You gotta love the backlit leaves during a photo shoot in the rainforest! Also, you better like the color green.

I just returned from a 1 week private photography workshop/tour that I lead for a client of Olympic National Park. The trip started last weekend with a sunny 80° day in Seattle. We drove down to Mount Rainier National Park for the first night with ambitions to photograph Reflection Lake at sunrise. The weather changed while we were sleeping, and when we woke up it was cloudy and 40°. So after getting skunked, we started our drive out to our main destination for the week in typical NW crummy weather. I kept telling Dan, that this weather was going to be great for our ambitions to photograph in the rainforest, but that it might not be great for photographing beach sunsets. Over the next 4 days, it mostly drizzled or poured on us, but we took advantage of the weather to photograph the spectacular greens of the temperate rainforest. I spent a lot of time walking around looking for patterns and unique mossy things to photograph. I really felt like I pushed myself photographically in a way that I have never done before in the rainforest. It is not an easy place to see the pictures through the chaos of branches and leaves. I was especially drawn to backlit leaves that just glowed green. I had fun, but it is again sunny and 80° here in Seattle. I’ll be outside working on my tan this afternoon.