The trails around Kennedy Creek and Lee Hill are some of my favorites at Lackawanna State Park. It’s been my go-to area of the park for years, and now extends up into the adjacent Rowlands Preserve. So with a bit of snow on the ground at the end of a cold spell, it’s no surprise that’s where I found myself, hiking in from the road.
Before finally abandoning Instagram altogether, I had been following several different photographers who specialized in forests. At least one of them was in the Pacific northwest, shooting in the dense, verdant, and often gloomy rainforest region. I found the photos captivating; they told the story of the trees, and conveyed a strong sense of mood and place.
Forest photography – in any forest – comes with its own unique challenges. For starters, your subjects, the trees, are very tall, and therefore difficult to capture in full. The instinct may be to go wide-angle, to include as much height as possible. But this must be tempered by the tradeoffs; distortion is common at wide angles, warping or skewing tree trunks, and it’s easy to end up in a situation where you lose individual trees among the forest itself, struggling to convey depth and layering.
A telephoto approach provides better subject isolation and can enhance the sense of depth, focusing in on details and complexities within the scene, but of course it sees a much narrower field of view, and it can be equally challenging to capture the grandeur and immensity of the forest through this perspective.
In my own practice, I’ve found the best success in the 50mm to short telephoto range. I tend to favor wide apertures, for the narrow depth of field and better subject isolation. I have also been experimenting with some additional post-processing, incorporating some hopefully-subtle split-toning and color adjustments that I don’t usually utilize.
Am I stacking up to my inspiration? Sometimes. I’m pleased with the photos above, although the wider-angle images are less engaging to my eye. As with all photography – and anything else, really – the key is practice, so I’ll keep making forest photos until I find the combination I’m looking for.