My wedding photography website and advertising swallowed my time last week. Computers, websites, and online advertising always stresses the brain with the endless problems each throws at us separately. Most of my blogging and computer work take place on an iPad mini at my crazy easy job at the Athletic Club of Bend outdoor pool. They let me do two jobs at once: the regular pool stuff and this computer stuff while hanging out in the office while listening to oddball music.

Right now? Midieval lute music. Other times I’ve fallen in love with 1930’s-40’s big band swing music. Other times yet Mozart pianos or Rossini operas.

My wandering mind takes me to oddball places sometimes.

That said, I felt the need to return to a favorite place in Olympic National Park. The Hoh Rainforest is a slice of heaven to me. With all the horrid knee replacement surgery news of the last month I”m contemplating skipping this year’s short course aquabike nationals in Omaha in June and hitting the Hoh in the spring. The knee doctor will be giving me some sort of shot in the next month or two that will enable me to possibly hike and backpack this summer and I want to take full advantage of the opportunity.

These pictures are what I call “Amosts.” Rating pictures as “Hits”, “Misses”, and “Almosts” comes from my time studying photojournalism at San Francisco State University in the mid-90’s with Ken Kobre. Every week we would have a new photojournalism assignment and would have to show three dark room printed 8x10 glossy black and whites on a wall. Every student, one at a time would get up and pin the pictures on the wall. Then Ken would look at them and say in a big booming voice, “Ooookay. What’s a Hit? What’s a Miss? What’s an Almost?”

I always killed it in what’s called Spot News and always struggled in what’s called Portraits.

I’ll comb through a pile of pictures sometime and give some Misses so the 1-6 people who read this blog can see for themselves what my training was like. It was pretty harsh. But it made me a better photographer. So honesty, if you go to these photo safaris or workshops the job of the mentor is to make money for him or herself. So they’ll say nice things about your photography to make you feel good about paying them money. The reality is you need to be harsh with your pictures so you get better. I’ve learned more from moments I’ve missed be it in landscape photography, wedding photography, portrait photography, or photojournalism than with the pictures that have won awards.

I struggled with portraits in photojournalism school and earned my worst grades in them. This motivated me to work on portraits. I ended up winning many awards with my portrait work and now have a separate portrait photography website. So it pays to not get high praise all the time because the difficulty can motivate a person to dig deeper and reach higher.

So here’s some Almosts. I’ll go through them one-at-a-time to talk about why.

I love doing the ‘crazy place tent picture’ when possible. In my road-trip ranking system I call this Class V camping. The Hoh Rainforest requires a cheap blue tarp over the tent because it can rain cats and dogs. I always think of it being a firefighter with a hose standing in the trees and hosing the place down. (Hey Hoser1 The Hoh River running behind the tent let me sleep like a log. But Crazy Tent Pictures never get printed unless they’re spectacular. This picture reminds me of being in the Hoh with the rain, the river, and the joy of being there all in one snapshot.

Something to keep in mind when backpacking into the Hoh with a tarp for your personal dryness factor: they erode and get holes after a couple years of use AND non-use. This was a new tarp, but I learned my lesson the hard way a couple years before with an old tarp.

The setting moon next to my campsite on the river. I remember specifically bringing the Nikon 100mm f2.8 lens on this trip. The resolution of my digital camera outdid the resolution of this film era lens. So this trip was the last time I used it for my work. I loved that lens because it was small and lightweight. Which is a big reason why I’m switching to Fuji. The problem, however, with my love of prime lenses happens when I’m too close or far from a subject and can’t move. The 60mm macro was the next widest and it was too wide for this picture. The resulting picture cut too much of the river off.

Plus the sky needs to be another color besides blue. Clouds and mountains blocked the rising sun so no color showed itself in the sky. I try to avoid entirely blue pictures. They depress us. Blue with red works really well and I was ready for it to happen.

I tilted the lens down (for those of you wondering why I didn’t earlier) but the picture remains blue. Nice to see and remember, but not one to print and hang on a wall.

Wider, more sky, catching a moment, keeping it simple, but again too blue. Those clouds need something in them to make this picture work. I do like the fog bank between the hill and the trees making the trees pop out. That’s one of the two reasons why I shot this picture to begin with. The other being the popcorn clouds populating the sky.

Meh.

I don’t do a pile of macro shots, but since the Nikon 60mm f2.8 macro was with me I did a few. Some people live for macro, I’m not really one. For starters the cost of all the specialized equipment from the lens to the focusing rail kept me at bay. Then I just don’t see hanging any on the wall. Ansel Adams called the negative the score and the print the performance. It’s ultimately all about the print. Sometimes, yes, I love them and would love to have them on the wall. But that love rarely shows in macro photography for me.

Plus this picture isn’t super sharp across the leaf. I was having a very difficult time with depth of field and micro movement of the leaf in the air.

Another for your information moment: notice the drops of water pooling on this leaf. Think of an entire forest of leaves and ferns covered with the same amount of water. If you venture out from the main trial to search for pictures about a pint of water will shed from all the green leaves with every step as you walk through and go straight into your shoes. That’s why I learned early on to both bring waterproof pants and rubber boots to slowly walk through the forest while watching the light and looking for hobbits. Not to mention a super high quality leak-proof rain jacket.

No joke, in the springtime the Hoh Rainforest really does overwhelm the eyes with this brilliant green. I always look for Middle Earth elves or hobbits when slowly moving through the forest.

One second I stood alone surrounded with the green and the next this Roosevelt Elk shows up stripping foraging for food. It walked along stripping leaves from the ends of the trees and moving on to the next tree after some chewing action. The wet and humid forest caused my lens switch to fog up and I missed some really cool scene setter shots of this elk with the giant trees.

The manual focus 100mm f2.8 lens did ok. The vertical picture is out of exact focus on the eye. So I would call that picture a total failure. The horizontal picture I liked enough to make a black and white print but it’s truly an almost because the elk’s horns are newly grown in and not the big giant horns you see in the fall.

What I love about the horizontal is the darker shadow behind the elk’s head which makes the soft light hitting the fuzz on his antlers shine. That’s why I made it black and white. But small peach fuzz covered horns really takes away from this picture for me.

That’s not to say how much fun it was for me to see and experience this so close. I did the Franz Lanting trick of letting it walk up to and past me. I do give wild animals a wide berth whenever encountering them. In all honesty I don’t trust them. The unpredictability makes them dangerous.

So there we have some Almosts from the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park. A person doesn’t need to get winners all the time to enjoy a place to its maximum. Sometimes the Almosts make good reminders of what it felt like being in a place and that’s just fine.