While rewarding, the Hoh Rain Forest is, by far, the most difficult forest subject I’ve ever shot.

Compared to the Hoh, other forests in Washington state (including the Sol Duc Trail, Grove of the Patriarchs, and so on) have a certain flow — there’s a layering of trees, undergrowth, rivers, and other features that make compositions easy to find.  Not so here — at least one other photographer has, quite accurately, described the Hoh as “chaotic,” a jumble of different elements thrown together in such a way as to make composition difficult.  Imagine, if you will, that you’re an architectural photographer, used to taking images of building interiors.  Now, imagine being placed in a warehouse full of priceless antique and designer furniture in no apparent order, and being charged with coming up with well-composed images of the contents…but without being allowed to move or rearrange any of the contents.  That’s what a shoot at the Hoh is like for nature photographers.

When shooting here, I had to especially keep in mind the old photographer’s adage of “close one eye first.”  Much of the order that first seems apparent as you hike the Hall of Mosses or Spruce Nature Trail is due to your two eyes and brain combining to give you a 3D image.  But close one eye, and what seems like an appealing foreground-middleground-background composition becomes a flat 2D “texture squash” with no discernible pattern or order.  Simply by closing one eye, you can avoid wasting time and memory-card space on images that will prove to be disappointing.

The second adage to keep in mind is a reversal of the usual proverb:  “Don’t miss the trees for the forest.”  When confronted with an enveloping environment like the Hoh, one’s first instinct is to try to find a “grand landscape” that takes in the whole essence of the rainforest.  Try that, and you’ll be guaranteed frustration.  Instead of photographing the forest, photograph the trees.  Zoom in on interesting details, and small sections of the forest where you can discover an overall logic of lines and patterns.  While I didn’t do this myself this time, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to visit the Hoh armed with only a telephoto zoom (maybe a 70-300mm for D-SLRs), so that you’re forced to find interesting compostions that don’t take in a large portion of what’s before you.  And, of course, zooming in avoids the perennial problem of trying to compose to cut out the undesirable white overcast sky (and don’t even dream of trying to photograph here in sunlight!).

A final observation:  there’s a tendency, when shooting in any forest with giant trees, to primarily go with vertical compositions to bring out the strong up-and-down lines of the trees.  Indeed, I did the same here, but found that, for whatever reason, my best images on this day were almost all horizontal.  Perhaps a large number of parallel vertical lines, however short, are preferable to a smaller number of more-extended verticals.  Go figure.