How to Photograph a Rainforest

Hi, I'm Ian Plant and I'm coming to you from the beautiful but chaotic rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. This is one of the most challenging environments I've ever had to work in. There are hundreds, thousands of branches coming in from all different angles around me, green moss covering everything. This is an incredibly chaotic environment. I know of another photographer who once described this as "green spaghetti", but I absolutely love the chaos.

So what I do when I'm in the forest is I look for the deepest, darkest, most tangled, most chaotic place I can find. I get inside and I use a wide-angle lens to open everything up and make it look much more expansive. Of course, when you're working with a wide-angle lens, composition becomes much more challenging. When you're working a telephoto lens, you can zoom in and you can exclude anything that's extraneous or that distracts from your composition. With a wide-angle lens, you don't have that same luxury.

So you gotta work extra hard to come up with a compelling composition, to find some order out of the chaos and to give the viewer something that they can relate to. I'm gonna spend a week here in the rainforest because I know it's gonna take me that long to get the shots that I want. I don't wanna just make good shots, I wanna make great shots. So I'm spending a lot of time hiking through the rainforest, exploring, looking for interesting places, looking for great compositions. Once I've found some good compositions, I'm gonna probably visit these places more than once and try shooting these compositions in different kinds of light.

For example, right now, I'm working in overcast light, which is flat and easy to work with. It brings out the colors. I'm mostly gonna work in some more challenging mixed light when it's a sunny day and the light's filtering through the forest canopy. That's gonna be much more difficult because the light is very contrasty. So it's harder to work with, but you can get some really spectacular backlighting effects and strong silhouettes when you're working in that sort of mixed light.

So even though it's more challenging, I'm gonna try all these different types of light with these compositions that I've picked out, hoping that something comes together and something clicks and I get that dare to dream shot. This is exactly the kind of shot I'm looking for. So here, I've got these strong leading lines that help direct the viewer deeper into the composition. And I'm gonna use those to cut through all the chaos and create a sense of order in my composition. What I really love about this scene is all of the branches that are arcing overhead coming into the scene.

They help frame the scene and they add some drama and color to the scene. One accessory that's really useful when you're working in the rainforest is a polarizer filter. And a polarizer is designed to remove reflections and glare from the scene. So I use the polarizing filter to remove the glare and that helps bring out all that intense beautiful green color of the foliage. Working with a chaotic subject such as this, especially when you're using a wide-angle lens, takes a lot of practice and a lot of trial and error.

I'm always on the lookout for bold shapes, curves and lines to create a sense of order and cut through the chaos in the composition. But more than that, I wanna draw the viewer in, I wanna transport them into the scene, I wanna give them a sense of being there. And if you can do that, if you can create a compelling composition that draws the viewer in, you're gonna grab their attention and never let go.