Back in April, Al DaValle and I led a photo workshop to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. We had a small group of enthusiastic photographers who braved some crazy weather, explored the rainforests and beaches of Olympic National Park, learned a lot, and made fabulous photographs. Like most of our National Parks, the Olympics are an extraordinary place that includes rugged mountains, old growth forests and wild beaches. Unlike many other National Parks, the Olympics are a challenging place to photograph. There are relatively few iconic locations for making beautiful but easy images. It's a visually complex environment, full of chaotic and, often, complex beauty, but that makes it a target rich environment. There are literally an infinite number of photographs to be made. Consequently, the greatest challenge to successful photography in the Olympics lies in learning to see the images within all that chaos and complexity. So our workshop became a week long exercise in seeing, and we were all much better at that by the end of that week.
As mentioned above, the weather provided the next big challenge. This spring in the Pacific Northwest this year has been much wetter and cooler than normal. We managed to keep our equipment and ourselves mostly warm and dry. In the lower forests and beaches we had plenty of rain, but rarely hard enough to force us under cover. However, up high, there was so much new snow, that the road to Hurricane Ridge never opened, which was a disappointment. But, there are lots of other great locations, so it we were able to get over that pretty quickly. We even made a side trip to the old gun emplacements at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, WA, which is famous for its abstract photo opportunities. We had a blast doing light painting with our iPhones and finding myriad visually interesting abstracts. Other locations included Lake Crescent, the Marymere falls trail, the Sol Duc Falls area, the Hoh Rainforest, the Salt Creek Recreation area, as well as Ruby, Rialto and 2nd Beaches.
We spent the first part of the workshop in Port Angeles, then moved to Forks to access the outer coast and rainforest. We rented an AirBnB house in each location. These provided us with a great base of operations where we spent time together reviewing and editing photos, learning new digital darkroom techniques, and just have a grand time together. We were so enthralled that on several occasions we didn't leave for dinner and just ordered in pizza. We were quite happy to learn that there's very good pizza available even out on the far corners of the country. Having these roomy houses, created a great learning environment and plenty of opportunity for informal sessions to dive into topics of particular interest to individual workshop attendees. We thought it so successful, that we'll be renting the houses again next year.
Below are a handful of my favorite images from our week on the Olympic Peninsula. If you'd like to see more, click here to review the full portfolio on my website. If you'd like to join us next year, please stay tuned for an announcement of our workshops in 2023. Hope to see you there.
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