Forest Photography

Forests can be difficult to photograph with harsh light streaming through the trees creating harsh shadows against brilliant highlights. Chaos reigns over simplicity where branches intersect, and textures vie for attention. They are busy places where the eye can find little rest. If the eye has difficulty finding rest, your camera lens as an extension of your eye will not find it. Finding a way to simplify your forest scenes becomes the task in forest photography.

Our brains like simplicity. When we look at an image, our brains like to be able to discern easily the subject and story the photographer finds important. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you walk through a park woodland to help you find and compose an image filled with story without the clutter.

Who is your story about? In forest photography, it isn’t simply about finding a nice composition, it’s about finding the main character of your image. It could be a gnarly tree, or a fern resting in the roots of a cedar, or flowers along the path, or even how the sun lights the moss clinging to a branch. Find the character you want to feature in your image then look for compositional elements to highlight the character.

How’s the light? Look around you. Is the sun shining brightly casting dark shadows through the forest? Is it an overcast day where shadows and highlights are softer? Is it a dull day with barely any light seeping through the foliage? Each of these lighting situations bring with it their own challenges and rewards. Harsh shadows give your images a graphic quality that you can further accentuate by converting your image into black and white. Turn your back to the sun to find a composition that is completely lit from the front yet the background falls into shadow. These images are great to emphasize shapes and textures of branches and leaves. Even better, look for plants that are backlit and the background falls into shadow as they make beautiful and dramatic images. Bright overcast days make photographing forests easier as everything in the woodland density is more evenly lit. You still have shadows and highlights but not as dramatic. This lighting lends itself well to images of the personality of the forest; wider landscapes filled with trees and the ferns and bushes that fill the understory. The darkest days lend themselves well to small little vignettes of the shapes and textures of life. Find the little bright areas of leaves and flowers to focus on. Don’t stay home in the rain either. Throw on your macro lens or extension tubes to capture rain drops on leaves. Or capture the ethereal nature of rain in the forest as the air around you seems to moisten and soften. If you are lucky enough to have a foggy day in the forest, you will find other worldly images and subjects happily separated from the busy-ness of the background.

Will a different lens help? Different focal lengths of your lenses will give you flexibility in your compositions. As discussed earlier, landscape photographers rely on the holy trinity of zoom lenses – the ultra-wide angle, the mid-range, and the tele-photo. With these lenses you can capture all the moods of the forest. With the ultra-wide angle, you can capture environmental details and play with the curvature of the lens distortion. Try getting in close to a flower and have the forest in the background. With your mid-range lens you can capture all the scenes and details close to the trail. Your tele-photo zoom can isolate features and details farther away. Change out your lens to see if that helps you create the image you want.

What happens to the image if you open or close the aperture? The aperture, while regulating how much light reaches the sensor, will also determine how sharp the elements in front or behind your subject are. The aperture determines how thick your plane of focus us. The wider the aperture, the narrower your plane of focus and more elements behind and in front of the subject will be out of focus. The narrower the aperture, the thicker your plane of focus and more elements around your subject will be in focus. Try making several images each with a different aperture to see how that changes the mood of your image.

Is the shutter speed helping you capture or stop motion? In forest photography you might think that you’d want to show trees as steadfast and solid. Trees don’t move – they stay in one place from sapling to collapse. And that may just be the story you want to tell. But is it the only story? Watch trees and you will see them sway in the breeze, bobbing their heads to an unheard beat. So, play with the dichotomy of solid trees that shiver with the slightest caress of a breeze by slowing down your shutter speed and let tittering trees become the focus. Another fun exercise with slower shutter speeds is to use intentional camera movement to create abstract images of the forest.

Did you remember to bring your tripod and polarizing filter? Two indispensable accessories not to leave behind are your tripod and polarizing filter. I darker forests, when your shutter speed is slow, you will want your tripod to reduce camera shake. Avoid the disappointment of having spent the day in the forest photographing verdant beauty to get home to see unintentionally blurry photos. Use a tripod. The other accessory, the polarizing filter, comes in very handy in the forest to help reduce the glare of reflected light off leaves. Using a polarizer can help bring richer, more saturated color to your image by reducing the reflective glare.

Did you perform border patrol? Your final act before releasing the shutter is to perform border patrol. This is one of those tasks to undertake in all landscape photography. Border patrol is to check the edges of your image to make sure there are no distracting elements coming into the frame. This was once far more important in film photography since you can easily clone out distractions in your editing software. But it is a good habit to get into. Sometimes a gentle shift of camera position can take out the distraction without disturbing your composition eliminating the need to fix it in post. Also, fixing those distraction in forest photography can be cumbersome with different branches and leaves that may not clone out as well.

With practice, forest photography turns into joy and meditation. Spend time exploring the forest.

Thinking in Black and White

Way back in the mists of yesteryear as a young student in the world of photography, when we used film and processed our images in a wet darkroom, my first year was spent looking at the world devoid of color. My lessons revolved around black and white film, black and white paper, and black and white processes. The concept behind this learning process to look at the world through a colorless lens taught me to see a scene reduced to its base elements of light and shadow, shape and form, texture and emotion. The ever-present Zone System created by the king of Black & White photography Ansel Adams taught an awareness of light on the land and its effects on film and print. The monochromatic world became so ingrained in my psyche that when I excitedly processed my first color images, they appeared garish and unnatural. And the lessons I learned during those initial courses were forgotten for a short time as I explored a new color-filled world. I lost my black and white base as I transitioned into color – thinking the two ways of recording light had very little to do with each other.

I was wrong. Oh, how I was wrong.

The lessons I learned in those first classes had everything to do with color photography. Was there any wonder why my first images in color lacked the compositional qualities and emotion that I had been trained to search out? There shouldn’t have been. I was like a beginning crafter left unsupervised in Hobby Lobby. I ran through film creating colorful junk. The colors were pretty, but there was nothing I wanted to show others and far too many boring sunsets. It took me a while before I included first year lessons with second year projects. I had to go back to thinking in black and white to create images that would help me pass my classes.

They are lessons I will not forget and find useful from time to time when photographing for black and white and looking at scenes to photograph in color.

SIMPLIFIES THE SCENE

Strip the color from your image and you are left with only tones of grey. There are no distracting colors that direct your viewer’s eye from the subject. You end up relying primarily on the shape, texture and contrast to captivate your viewer. You strip your image down to its barest elements. Composition skills are brought to bear in black and white photography – you need to create compelling compositions in your images to help bring them to life or they become a mass of grey no matter how much contrast you add.

SHAPES YOUR SUBJECT

Photography is about recording light onto media – film, paper, or digital sensor. When you remove the color, all you really have left is light and shadow to shape the subject in your compositions. Our brains understand how light falls into shadow on curved objects and blocked objects and can discern between balls and bricks just by how light falls across them. You can use light and shadow to emphasize the shape and the shape then becomes as important to the subject as the subject itself. Also, you can simplify the scene to highlight only the shapes within the image.

ADDS DRAMA

Finally, you can highlight the mood, emotion, or texture of your subject. With no other distractions, your viewer can gain a greater sense of the ideas behind the image. Think of some of the most powerful portraits from the past. I always think if the images captured by Dorothea Lange during the depression. She was able to capture raw emotion in the simplest of images. “Migrant Mother” just is not the same image if I imagine it in color. Try it. Think of an image then imagine it in color. Does it feel the same? When you strip an image of color, you simplify the image to its basic shapes and its basic emotions.

TIMELESSNESS

There is also a timeless quality to black and white images. A quality that stretches back to the earliest days of photography and far into the future. Fads happen in color photography. We may not notice it much, but take a look at an image from the 70’s or 80’s. Not only do we know what decade it comes from because of the color palette of the day (avocado green and harvest gold anyone?) but there is a tonality to the image – a faded low contrast haze. But look at a black and white image from the 70’s and you may not recognize that it is from the 70’s – unless dad’s horn-rimmed glasses give it away. Because of this timeless quality, many photographers find that black and white photography lends itself well to fine art prints.

However, not every image translates well to B&W. Look for scenes that have a subject that conversion to black and white will help emphasize the subject. These are often subject that have a different color palette, texture, or lighting. Where the subject won’t get lost in grey. We are lucky in the digital age that we can convert an image to black and white to test it out and if we don’t like it – we can delete those layers. Converting to black and white will not save an image that is not exposed correctly or composed well. In fact, those flaws can be highlighted in black and white imagery

How to create your black and white image:

In camera: A lucky few of us have the ability to record only the reflected intensity with our digital cameras. Some cameras will record both a color version and a monochrome version. This helps when you are having difficulty determining if an image would look good in black and white. I personally like to make my conversions in Photoshop (or Lightroom).

In Computer: You can convert your images to black and white with any photo editing software. In the Adobe world (Photoshop and Lightroom) several companies also have plug-ins that will convert the image for you in different monochrome styles. Simple on-line tutorials will show you how to convert and adjust your image for any software you use.

Ideas for black and white images:

While not every image translates well to black and white, you can photograph everything in black and white.  Keep your eyes open for strong contrasts that highlight shapes. Making everyday objects into abstract images of light and shadow is a fun way to experiment and practice your techniques. Try long exposures or Intentional Camera Movement (where you purposefully move the camera during the exposure) for interesting abstract images. Photograph subjects with a lot of texture and highlight that texture with strong contrast. Find scenes that you want to simplify or highlight a particular subject.