Capturing a Deep Woods Photo

One of the most difficult kinds of photographs to capture is a photo taken within a deep woods, especially when the prevailing background color is green. In most cases you end up with an image with a harsh green tint cast across the entire frame. This is just the nature of light and requires a bit of creative white balance tweaking to prevent. Even so, a photo with that one prevailing color tint can in its own right become an interesting image. Most of the time though, I tend to photograph the deep woods with the intent of converting the image into a black and white.

Deep woods settings do tend to lend themselves well to black and white, however, depending on the kind of light that is filtering through the green canopy, this too can be tricky. Often you will encounter a wide range of contrasts ranging from very dark shadowed areas to very bright sunlit areas. This range more often than not becomes the problem as the camera simply cannot deal with that wide of a range of contrast. You will lose a great deal of detail in either the light or dark areas with one or the other being blown out.

Most times I will shoot with a circular polarized attached to my lens. This helps to reduce the glare and allows for a certain amount of control over the lighting. I will also usually expose for the brightest areas and let everything else simply fall where it wants to within the exposure. I do this by shooting on Aperture Priority and then using the +/- exposure compensation to bring the brightly lit areas into an exposure range where detail becomes apparent. Then during post processing I will bump the mid-tones and dark areas up a bit to bring the image exposure more inline across the full spectrum of what was captured.

HDR is of course another option, where you take a series of images using different exposure values and allowing the software to blend them into a finished, more evenly exposed image. As this blog is mostly for novice and less experienced photographers, I'll leave the HDR discussion on the table for another time, but I will say HDR, although it has its place, is better suited for certain kinds of lighting situations like inside a Cathedral. The idea with a photograph in my opinion is to make it look natural and HDR, unless it is expertly crafted, can often make the image appear a bit "Over Cooked".

Many times, photographers at all levels will make the assumption that whenever they are photographing something, they must capture the scene as though it is an exact replication of what was seen. Yes, sometimes this actually does work, however, creative photography allows for you the photographer to capture less about what you see visually, and more about what you felt while you were there. This is open to interpretation by each photographer, but photographing the deep woods is a perfect opportunity to explore this concept.

What you want to accomplish is to create an image that imparts that sense of place and wonder. The Deep woods is often filled with both, but you have to not only look for it, you must feel for it as well. Sometimes it is just a momentary glimpse, the way a tree hangs out over a creek, they way a large boulder fills the frame, or how the trees themselves line up...or any other number of ways.

Photographing the deep woods can be one of the most inspiring and challenging of photographic opportunities. Just keep open the idea of capturing what you feel and look for those compositions that reveal the essence of the woods you encounter.