The ultimate guide to woodland photography

So spring is moving on, and the natural world has come to life.

We're well into the usual springtime sequence of wildflowers, woodlands are starting to leaf out with growing swathes of vibrantly green foliage, and animal young are starting to appear. 

Now is the time for woodland photography, capturing an expanding swathe of forest floor flowers under a rapidly developing canopy of leaves. But what are the best ways to get great results? 

After all, amid woodland, it is often almost impossible, quite literally, to see the wood for the trees. All is a bit of a jumble, and it can be very hard to pull together a meaningful and effective composition. 

All too often, the resulting images are just a two-dimensional representation of the worst that can happen in the real world – simply a scene of tangled chaos!

This article aims to break down the chaos, tease out some threads of sense among that tangle, put together some techniques for what to look for in a woodland scene, and bring those scenes together into great photographic compositions using good camera and aesthetic skills.

 

 

What to expect in our springtime woodlands

Now is very much the time for springtime woodland photography, with almost everything bursting into vibrantly colourful life. 

Carpets of bluebells are just about at their peak in many places right now, and in the coming weeks, they'll be joined by – and then replaced by – the likes of wild garlic, red campion and many more. 

However, as the tree canopy closes with new leaves, light levels on the forest floor will drop, and flower numbers will greatly decrease, except perhaps in areas where sunlight remains. So if woodland flowers are on your list of subjects for this year, you'd better get moving right now!

Of course, all that fresh green vegetation, whether it be the leaves above, or the likes of ferns and shrubs closer to the ground, presents some vibrantly green photogenic subject matter. May is the time to capture these new leaves at their finest, while all that chlorophyll is fresh and at high concentrations, and before the rain, fungi and insects have a chance to cause any damage.

In addition to so much plant life, animals are another thing to think about, especially woodland birds and insects. These are covered in some of my other articles, so here I'm concentrating on the woodlands themselves.

 Related: The dos and don'ts of bird photography 

 

Woodland photography techniques

In any form of photography, composition and light are critical to creating great images. But in the context of woodland photography, both suffer from special constraints and complications that make such photography significantly more complex. Let's look at composition first.

 

Looking for woodland compositions

The art of a great composition consists of putting together an image that contains a single strong subject that dominates the image frame, free from any cluttering, distraction or competition for secondary elements. 

Not surprisingly, in most woodland scenes, this is virtually impossible. Everywhere you look is cluttered at best, if not outright chaos. And very often, the vegetation is so dense that you can't even step back to open up the scene and create some space.

The inevitable conclusion is that, no matter how beautiful a scene may look to the eye, most of it won't make for a great photographic subject. You need to find those few views and woodland elements that fall together into a composition. Or at least can be 'massaged' into a good composition through the appropriate use of lens focal length, depth of field and just the right perspective/angle of view. You're looking for the atypical to shoot something that you hope will give a representative idea of the woodland.

To help achieve this, we need some space; a clearing or glade in the woodland can be ideal, or (something I use a lot) is a river cutting a natural clearing through the trees. 

The ribbon of water provides some space around the trees. Also, it generates a naturally attractive photogenic element that can lead the eye through your image frame, giving a sense of order and beauty to the walls of trees all around.

Another solution is to find a viewpoint that gives you a truly wide view of the woodland, something that sets the woodland scene as a whole. For this, we need ideally somewhere outside and perhaps above the main body of the woods. Again a clearing of some sort, but perhaps a rocky outcrop standing clear of the treetops. Or perhaps a hilltop or ridge above (though not too distant from) the trees.

 

 

Close-up compositions

Things are slightly different when photographing smaller plants, such as ferns or wildflowers. Of course, you're deliberately coming in a lot closer to a much smaller subject, so lack of space is usually not an issue. Clutter, however, certainly is, but there are several things we can do to reduce this, part of which inevitably involves choosing our physical position and hence perspective on the subject.

When photographing a carpet of woodland flowers, such as bluebells or wild garlic, it is often tempting to use a wide-angle lens to show as much of the flower carpet as possible. However, this increases the risk of clutter creeping into the frame and exaggerating the spaces between the flowers, in the final image reducing that carpet to just a smattering. 

You can solve both by reducing the field of view, such as with a short telephoto lens, which will crowd the flowers together, enhancing the sense of a dense carpet and reducing the risk of background clutter appearing. 

One of the worst mistakes I see photographers make when shooting plants close to the ground is simply standing over it/them and pointing the camera downwards. 

This may be a convenient method of photographing a plant, but it rarely results in a truly worthwhile image. It's much better to get yourself down to the plant's level, see the world from its perspective, and allow it to dominate the image frame. 

You may still shoot it with the camera looking downwards if that is genuinely the best angle to photograph the plant. But getting down low does open up the possibility of other options, especially looking sideways-on to the plant, looking along the ground to the plant, and perhaps towards a background view of the surrounding woodland. 

When shooting any plant, whether looking downwards or sideways-on or when shooting wider woodland scenes, one of the most critical compositional issues is the depth of field and the amount of the image that is sharply in focus. 

You'll want to have the subject plant(s) sharp, but how much of the background needs to be sharp depends on what you're trying to achieve. Using a very narrow lens aperture (i.e. a high f-number) will ensure that much of your view will be sharp, including your subject, but this can make it harder for your subject to stand out from the background and increase the sense of clutter.

It is often better to use a wider lens aperture (lower f-number) to reduce the depth of field, keeping the subject sharp but throwing the background out of focus. This will help the subject stand out, keep attention on that subject, and reduce the level of distraction from background elements.

A knock-on effect of this depth of field control is the shutter speed that is likely to be possible. A narrow lens aperture will inevitably result in a slow shutter speed, hence the need to put the camera on a tripod. A wide-open lens aperture (i.e. a low f-number) may give you a shutter speed fast enough to enable hand-held photography but will result in a depth of field too small even to get the whole of your subject in focus. Always play safe, and use a tripod.

 

 

Making use of woodland light

It's tempting to photograph as much as possible during bright shiny sunlight if only to maximise the amount of light available for woodland photography. This is particularly so when you're shooting under a dense woodland's shady, light-reducing canopy. Anything that can deliver more light into that forest environment has to be good, right?

Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Bright sunlight filtering down through a dense canopy will result in patches of brightly lit highlights and deep shadows on the woodland floor, resulting in a patchwork of light and shadow that completely breaks up any composition you may have spotted into a completely incomprehensible mishmash. 

Your eye and brain working together and seeing everything in three dimensions may be able to make sense of it all, but your poor camera - seeing the world only in two dimensions and unable to cope with the huge contrast range - will most likely flounder. It is an example that amply illustrates that a camera does not interpret the world in the same way that we do.

So I would generally recommend woodland photography during cloudy conditions or even – which can result in some truly moody images – in fog. Cloudy weather results in a nice soft light falling on the forest floor, giving a reasonably even illumination across the trees and ground vegetation. 

The result is images where the composition rules supreme, unimpeded by highlights and shadows, with the vibrant vegetative greens and rich flower colours brought out to their fullest.

Woodland photographed in fog is another matter altogether, the water vapour reducing detail and depth, generating ethereal, moody images where the outline shapes of trees and other plants are paramount. Success here depends more than ever on seeking out those simple compositions, such as a single branch or trunk, that work brilliantly in outline, unbroken by confusing clutter from surrounding vegetation.

All this again brings us back to the need to use a tripod. Light levels under a dense forest canopy will always be low, even on a sunny day. In cloudy weather, especially in fog, it can be quite gloomy, making a tripod an absolute must, even if you intend to shoot with the lens aperture wide open (which I don't recommend).

This is not to say that you should never do woodland photography in sunlight. There are certain situations where you can make it work brilliantly. The most obvious example would be those views of the outside woodland, from that rocky outcrop or hilltop already mentioned. In this situation, it can be very effective to have the trees lit up by the sunlight, especially during the golden hour of early morning or late afternoon.

For views within the woodland, the most effective use of the sunlight is when it is very low in the sky and is managing to shine through the trees. 

In this situation, it can be very worthwhile to point the camera towards the sun and then create a starburst effect as the sun shines past and around the tree trunks. The trunks and branches of those trees closest to the sun will be rendered in silhouette, but foliage further away will retain its details and green colour. 

This technique can be further enhanced on misty mornings when the sun shines through the tree trunks, and the mist results in stunningly beautiful sunbeams radiating down through the trees. 

Related to this technique but somewhat different is the photography of leaves backlit by the sun at just about any time of day. More likely to work with trees on the edge of a woodland and so well exposed to the sun, you can achieve some fantastic results by simply using a telephoto lens to home in on small groups of leaves with the sun behind them. 

This can result in beautifully backlit leaves, with the sun also creating starburst effects around their edges. This generally works best when shooting just a single layer of leaves: the images are likely to become too cluttered if multiple layers become involved in your image frame. 

 Related: The complete guide to spring photography

 

Putting it all together

Coming up with some great woodland images is a delicate balancing act between finding workable compositions within the chaos of woodland and the need for useable but effective lighting. 

There are multiple factors to consider at any given moment, any one of which can make many a location fantastic under certain conditions but useless under others. It can change from one to the other in minutes with the weather and time of day.

Even once you've worked out the compositional and lighting needs, there is still one more element that can be wholly unpredictable: the wind. Low light levels and the need for a reasonably narrow lens aperture to ensure a large image depth of field inevitably mean a slow shutter speed. 

As a result, you will need windless conditions to ensure all the leaves, stems and branches stay in place and don't give you some potentially distracting movement blurs. Achieving this can be a bit of a trial requiring some patience to shoot during a lull in the wind.

A little blur in some leaves here and there can add a bit of dynamism and drama to an image, so it is not always a bad thing – try to shoot both types of image and see which you prefer. Things can start to break down if the wind-induced movement becomes too much. However, when things get crazy, you can go with the flow and generate some wonderfully abstract movement blur images! They can be remarkably effective.

So get out there to those woodlands and get stuck into some wonderful spring woodland photography. I hope you'll enjoy it.

 

This blog was written by a hugely experienced Devon-based professional photographer. Nigel works with the USA's prestigious National Geographic Image Collection, among many other bodies, and is a Fellow of the British Institute of Professional Photography.

Nigel runs regular photography workshops in southwest England. To find out more about these, go to https://www.nigelhicks.com/photography-workshops-courses/.

To find out more about Nigel's work in general, feel free to take a tour of his website at www.nigelhicks.com.

 

 

Specialist camera insurance from Ripe Photography

If you're heading out to photograph woodland this spring, you need to protect your camera and accessories against theft, loss, and damage through specialist camera insurance.

Our bespoke cover can be tailored to fit your exact requirements, so you only pay for what you need.

Click the button below to discover how we can help and get an instant online quote today. 

 

Get an instant quote today.