Photo Wednesday: Sol Duc River

I’ve been wanting to get my photography on this site more frequently, and so I’m kicking off a couple of new things. Every Wednesday is going to be Photo Wednesday, in which I post and talk about an image of mine that is anything other than birds. And Fridays are now Feathery Friday, when I will do the same for one of my bird photos.

All of these images will be favorites of mine and I will talk a bit about how they were created and what I think of them today. Hopefully you will find them enjoyable as well.

Today’s image is my favorite from the photo retreat I took with Art Wolfe and his team in Olympic National Park in 2019, which had a focus on the intimate side of landscape photography. I was challenged on this workshop, both photographically and physically, and this photo involved a hike into the Sol Duc rainforest that I wasn’t sure I was up to, but Art’s team encouraged me to try and even carried my gear in and back out so I could focus on the hike. It was a stretch, but I made it, although the last 1/4 mile back out I was starting to run on fumes. One of Art’s assistants stayed with me at one of the first waterfall locations on that trail — which was dry, to our surprise — while the rest of the group moved on to another, larger fall further down the trail. We spent an hour or so there discussing composition and trying things, and at the time I was really struggling to get my head around intimate composition and away from the epic landscape mentality.

The fallen log on the right of this shot had attracted me immediately, but neither of us really saw a way to use it well. The light then changed and some sunlight broke out from the clouds, and I thought doing a composition of the trees side by side might work. My partner wasn’t convinced, but I worked on it for a bit and took this shot. When we both saw it on the screen on the camera, we realized it had potential. I did some processing to emphasis the lit aspect of the trees against the shadows behind it to try to add some depth to the shot, and I really love the outcome.

I think what makes this composition work is that third, tiny tree in the center growing iout of the fallen log. It connects the two bigger trees across the relatively wide space between them. It gives a line for the eye to follow, and the red of the fallen logs throws in a splash of color in an otherwise mostly monochromatic image. It’s cropped to 16:9 which I felt was right for this one. If I were to re-process this image, I’d likely recrop a bit tighter because I now feel there might be a bit too much space to the left of the tree and that might improve the balance of the image a bit. It’s worth experimenting with at some point.

But still… I love this image, and I loved that workshop because Art and his team knew how to push us just hard enough to get us out of our comfort zones to open up new creative mindsets, but not so hard we failed or grew frustrated and gave up.

Gear notes: Fuji X-T3 with 16-55 at 47mm, 1/2 second @ F/22, ISO 160.