Living in the high desert of Central Oregon I see mostly drab browns and greens all year. It’s sometimes a little underwhelming in my mind. It seems like yesterday the first time I ever went to the Hoh Rainforest with a now ex-girlfriend. It was midsummer and we backpacked all the way through the Hoh to the split in the trail about 8 miles in. I was carrying not one, but two Nikon N-90’s for some reason. Maybe didn’t want one to get lonely at home or something. That’s something I would never do now. We ran into Washington landscape and wildlife photographer Art Wolf on the way out and did a picture with him. I still have that picture but don’t have it hanging up because my wife, Mary, might not like seeing me having fun with my ex-girlfriend.
Anyhoo.
What struck me, a San Francisco native, about the Hoh and has never faded in my mind is the amount of absolute green. I can never get past the green leaves, moss, everything. It surrounds me and fills my mind and spirit with joyous life. So as a photographer I tend to focus on what interests me the most. In the case of the Hoh it’s the green surrounding and filling every space.
On my wedding photography blog I recently did an entire series of posts about the lenses used for that branch of photography. It started with going through a bunch of weddings to look for images to use for the Wedding Wire advertising. I started with 5,000 pictures with the goal of getting it down to 20. Each time I went through the pile of pictures in Lightroom I gave the keepers a star. One star up to five to get it down to 20 images. Of course when I got it down to 20 and went onto the Wedding Wire, the site said I could use 50. Luckily 50 was the exact amount of four star images I had already edited, so sending them out became easy.
But I didn’t stop with just picking out the pictures, I looked at the metadata to see what lenses were used most often. To get enough pictures for several blog posts I went down to the two star edit. The resulting pictures surprised me. My two most used lenses for my favorite wedding photography are the 35mm f1.4 and the 85mm f1.4. It’s not even close.
So a couple days ago I went through a springtime trip to the Hoh and picked out my 2 star keepers and thought it would make a nice post because one common item stood out in all the pictures: the green. Photographer John Shaw always says to find something in a scene you love and find a way to just shoot that something. This post reminded me of something Art Wolf always says about shooting something in 360 degrees; meaning to walk around it and shoot it in every way you can imagine.
Seeing these pictures makes me feel the need to return to the Hoh this spring to experience the green joy of the place and do more of the same: looking for pictures and elves.
Green, green everywhere. This isn’t a picture I would print, but it’s definitely a picture I would shoot and keep as a memory.
I found this at the eastern edge of the Hoh. Green surrounded with moss covered trees a little brighter than the rest can’t be passed up.
I always love the contrast between the leaves and a giant tree covered in green moss. It’s cool to see. One can almost see an elf or hobbit hiding behind it.
The Hoh frequently has cloud cover, and rain, which becomes a giant softbox in the sky softly illuminating everything below.
The giant moss covered tree trunks whose trees seem to disappear into the overhanging branches blow me away.
You might be thinking, “No way can it be that green.” I tell you it is this green. I’m not doing anything besides auto levels and some dodging and burning to these pictures.