This year’s Olympic National Park workshop was another success. How can it not be? It’s Olympic!
This year was a little different though. For one, Sol Duc Falls was inaccessible because the National Park Service chose the week we were there to rehabilitate the Sol Duc Falls Bridge. So we couldn’t photograph the falls. But this was a blessing in disguise. Instead of walking all the way to the falls, we stopped at a little stream that’s about half-way there (which is why I have informally named it “Half-way Stream”) and spend a lot of time there.
I’ve always liked this little stream with its moss-covered rocks and many, many cascades. But we’ve always stopped there in addition to photographing Sol Duc Falls so we’ve never really had the luxury of spending as much time as we wanted there. This year was different, and we explored the you-know-what out of this small area, finding lots of great scenes from intimate shots of Trilliums to the classic forest with a stream running through it.
This tiny area has to be one of my very favorite places in the entire park.
Another way this trip was different was the weather. Except for one of each, it was overcast or raining for every single sunrise and sunset. That’s not a bad thing when photographing forests, streams and waterfalls though.
But we made the best of a sunrise on Lake Crescent (I’m getting closer to my fantasy sunrise shot there) and a sunset on Rialto Beach.
We also visited a few waterfalls and made a couple of trips to the Hoh where we spent one morning photographing a second growth spruce forest.
In the field, we spent time with finding shots, composition, hyperfocal focusing, blending images for exposure as well as blending two images shot for different shutter speed effects. In other words, a background shot that captured a waterfall with silky water (long exposure) blended with a shot for the foreground that used a faster shutter speed to stop the motion of flowers blowing in the breeze created by the waterfall. All good and valuable tools to have in your arsenal.
Below are a few more images I captured during the workshop.
