Photography In The National Parks: Your Armchair Photography Guide To Olympic National Park, Part 2 – The Forests

Someone once remarked to me “Forests are all the same…”

If you read Part 1 of my Armchair Photography Guide to Olympic National Park, you’ll have a good idea of what you might encounter during trips to beaches within the park’s boundaries and how to photograph fantastic images using your smartphone, point-and-shoot, or SLR.

In this Part 2, you’ll see just how different the forests really are, from the damp, mossy Hoh and Quinault Rain Forests to the drier old growth forests of the Sol Duc Valley and those surrounding Marymere Falls near Lake Crescent. The yellow lines on the map below detail the combined winter and summer routes I traveled for this Armchair Guide, while the red lines show you the forested areas I photographed.

The Rain Forests

Heading south to north, drive to the lesser visited but no less beautiful Quinault Rain Forest, 27 miles south of Kalaloch Beach. Take the North Shore Road to enter the rain forest and make your first stop at July Creek, a very short loop trail complete with picnic tables and picturesque bridge over the area’s namesake. As you stand on the bridge over the creek, use a wide-angle lens or your wide-angle setting on your point-and-shoot to encompass the creek and surrounding rain forest scenery. It’s a great opportunity for some “silky water” shots to create a silky, satiny effect on the burbling water. Depending upon the time of day you visit, you might not require any sort of filter at all, or, you might want to pull out the polarizer (CPL) or neutral density (ND) filter you carry in your camera pack. For silky water, you need a slow shutter speed. Slow shutter speeds let in more light through the lens to blur the moving water for that satiny effect. Too much light, however, and you’ll overexpose (blow out) your composition. CPL and ND filters add shade to allow a slower shutter speed while keeping the rest of the scene nicely exposed.  

After you’ve photographed the stream, walk further along the trail, turn around, and photograph that charming bridge you stood on a moment ago. Although many photographers dislike adding anything man-made to their landscapes, these same objects really do provide scale and reference to an image.

From July Creek, drive further along the road to the Quinault Rain Forest Ranger Station, where you can photograph the bridge across Kestner Creek for a nice “leading line” shot that guides your audience’s eyes from one part of the shot to another and then on to whatever adventure awaits beyond that bridge. Cross the bridge and wander the Maple Glade Nature Trail for compositions of the many different shades of green the rain forest environment offers.

Depart the Quinault Rain Forest and travel north toward the Hoh Rain Forest. After passing the park entrance booth, stop along any of the pullouts for views of the Hoh River and the trees on the other side of the riverbank. Those trees create inviting patterns and textures.

Road’s end takes you to a large parking lot, the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center, and several short trails (plus one long one) through the rain forest. Before you choose a trail, check out the marshy lake you noticed to your left as you drove into the parking lot. You might see a blue heron, if you are lucky.

If you only hike one trail, then choose the .8-mile Hall of Mosses Trail. It’s a loop trail along which you can see a fern-carpeted forest interior of tall trees stretching up for that bit of sunlight above the canopy and moss-coated spruce and hemlock with exposed roots wrapped around remnants of nurse logs. Take your time framing these compositions to create your photographic story. Remember to get a few leading line trail shots, too.

Be aware that crowds are heavier during the summer months. Early mornings (before 8:00 a.m.) are the best times to enjoy this trail to yourself. Stop and listen to the occasional lone bird. Use a dedicated video cam or your SLR’s, point-and-shoot’s, or smartphone’s video mode to capture audio and video of the surrounding forest.

The Drier, Old-Growth Forests

From the Hoh Rain Forest, continue Highway 101 past the town of Forks and 40 miles further north then east to make a sharp right turn onto the Sol Duc Road. You may or may not have this same impression, but I admit to a vague sense of unease, for want of a better word, as I drove through the narrow valley with the tall, shadowy trees on either side of me closely lining the road. It just felt *different* from the lush rain forests I’d previously photographed, and really, the forests of the Sol Duc *are* different. The trees are less moss-covered, tall and straight, creating obvious geometry perfect for interesting photo creations. Stop at any pullout along the road, or meander along the .5-mile Ancient Groves Nature Trail to see and photograph that difference. You might end up taking more vertical shots than horizontals to focus on the trees’ height.

Get a road shot or two, while you are at it. Park roads are excellent leading line subjects. Just look both ways to make certain there is no traffic when you step into the middle of the road.

Photograph the Sol Duc River. Between the Salmon Cascades stop and the Ancient Groves Nature Trail is a small parking area to your right, in front of a fenced cliffside. Park your vehicle (obey the sign and *do not* climb over the fence) and take your camera and tripod back up the road until you can see the river. Use the trees and shrubbery for natural frames. As you compose your shot, watch for the large corrugated metal drainpipe at the edge of the cliff. To avoid including the drainpipe in your images, use the rule-of-thirds technique to place the river to one side of your viewfinder, or arrange your shot so that the drainpipe is hidden by ferns and other plants, or zoom in for a closer view of the river.

The most popular and thus heavily trafficked short hike in this area is the .8-mile (one-way) Sol Duc Falls trail located at the very end of the Sol Duc Road. Unless you start around 6:30 a.m., you’ll be surrounded by people. That doesn’t mean you won’t get great photos (both horizontal and vertical) of this beautiful waterfall. You can either include the people in your shot for scale or use your telephoto lens or close-up mode on your point-and-shoot or smartphone to zoom in on your watery subject. It’s also another opportunity to practice your silky water photography.

Trust me when I tell you the bridge crossing the falls is the best place for an overall shot. Even though I saw no “stay on the trail” signs around the falls, I strongly urge you to remain on the trail and not clamber down the wet, moss-covered rocks for a closer look. An online article published in the Peninsula Daily News reports on the rescue of a teenager stuck at the waterfall. Can you guess how that might have happened?

From the Sol Duc Valley, return to Hwy 101 and continue westward to Lake Crescent. Look for the left turnoff to Storm King Ranger Station and Marymere Falls. This heavily hiked .7-mile trail (one-way) takes you through old growth forest, across Barnes Creek, and up to the tall, narrow waterfall. The last portion of the trail is a loop, and while it doesn’t matter which way you take the loop to see the falls, I found it easier to follow the sign’s arrow pointing left. You’ll have two views of the falls: a lower view showing the entirety of the waterfall straight on, and a higher view of the falls surrounded by a lovely natural frame of ferns.

Once you return home and have more time to review your forest images, some of those shots might appear a little dark and featureless to you. Don’t be disappointed and delete the photo. Remember, your eyes are much better at seeing through shadows. Your camera captures all that data, but those pixels may need to be teased out to produce an image matching what your memory recalls. Don’t be like the young man I spoke with during my early morning trek to Sol Duc Falls. He showed me his point-and-shoot LCD with photos he’d taken of the waterfall and asked what settings he should use to lighten up the scene. I gave him some advice but also mentioned he could lighten those shadows during the edit stage. Frowning slightly, he shook his head and told me he never edited his photos. I sighed inwardly.

I believe photos need at least a minimal amount of editing, so below are a couple of tips to bring out the inner glow and reduce shadows of your forest photos.

If you’ve ever seen old-timey portraits, you’ll have noticed the sides and tops of the image are dark while the subject in the center remains light. This is called vignetting. Apply a little of that vignetting to your forest photo to produce a soft glow to your forest interior image. Some photo editing software will have a tool or preset for vignetting.

In addition to a vignette tool, preset or slider, most photo editing software will also have the same thing to remove shadows. It comes in very handy for dark forest interiors.

Have some fun and try your hand at HDR (high dynamic range) photography. This technique uses a combination of one or more photos of the same scene at different exposures and combines them in ways to reduce shadows and blown out highlights while creating depth to the composition. Stand-alone and plug-in software like Aurora 2019, Nik HDR Effect or Photomatix (among the many HDR programs out there) make HDR work easy, with plenty of presets from which to choose. The real trick is to generate a natural-looking image. Many photographers use too much of a heavy hand at HDR and end up with a very unrealistic version of the scene they originally captured. That, or else they are looking for something totally surreal.

Ok, now that you’ve got a better idea of beaches and forests to see and photograph in Olympic National Park, stay tuned for the final Part 3 of this Armchair Photography Guide and get ready for the mountains.