I get the sense many photographers have a love-hate relationship with photographing the forest, the woods or, as our UK compatriots refer to it, woodland.

A quick observation…I can’t help but laugh whenever I see an English or Scottish photographer sneer and scowl at the thought of woodland photography only to present images later of neat, tidy, and apparently lovingly tendered (perhaps by whistling dwarves or fairies) gardenscapes that pass for woods over there! I want to go there. And then I want to offer a visit to the acres of gnarly, jangly, and chaotic impassability endemic to what we call the ArkLaTex region encompassing north Texas, north Louisiana, and southern Arkansas. I suspect my friends from the UK would turn away in horror.

IS SOMETHING SINISTER AT WORK?

And they might be right to do so. Because I wonder if there’s not something darker and more sinister going on here, some kind of ancient, baked into the human DNA thing that sends shivers up our spine when confronted with a walk in the woods.

Who hasn’t sat around a campfire in the middle of the forest, miles from anywhere, and told tales of murder and mayhem, and then tried to go to sleep? Who hasn’t seen a horror movie built round that very premise? Or read fairy tales about innocents wandering aimlessly into the forest only to find themselves beset by witches with ovens or poison apples or magic mirrors, all designed to capture and put them through unimaginable horrors? In current context those witches become laconic moonshiners, makers of meth, or growers of marijuana, none of whom would likely be welcoming to visitors.

I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy; I’m a Middle Earth nerd. And the scenes Tolkien wrote about traveling through Mirkwood or Fangorn Forest hit every single sense of innate fear, anxiety, worry, and apprehension that come to mind while on a walk through the woods.

As humans we strive to impose order on the unknowable, to sort through the chaos of the world and make some kind of sense of it, creating understandability and logic out of entropy. Right now, in these viral times, a pandemic like Covid-19 makes us realize just how thin is the veneer that separates us from what we think of as normal and predictable and that which is, in reality (see: history, human, geological, physical, astronomical, biological, etc.), messy as hell. And now that I think on it, that’s kind of a decent analogy between art and life. Life is shambolic and unpredictable. An artist tries to see through all of that and straighten it out, bring it down to its essence. And maybe we should all be doing a little bit more of that right now.

For a landscape photographer, you learn to police the edges of your viewfinder frame, to make sure there’s no stray branches creeping in, no electric wires strung across, or weird colors that would screw up the message. A portrait photographer wants to make sure it doesn’t look like you’ve got a tree or a stop sign growing out of your head.

Here’s the thing about a walk in the woods, though: it’s full of stray branches. They’re everywhere! And they’re not all growing from trees, they’re snapping and crunching underfoot. A forest is rife with maddening pandemonium. Not difficult to understand, then, why a landscape photographer will make a hard turn at wood’s edge and walk toward the grandeur of mountains and glacial lakes, crashing waves on the coast, or the simplicity of a bucolic village or river’s edge or farm field. I don’t know about artists in other mediums, but I’d not be surprised to learn they feel similarly about the woodlands. So much easier and satisfying to capture a rock-strewn stream flowing under a covered bridge beneath a pastel, cloud-streaked sky. Or to work with the symmetry and geometrical synchronicity of shapes and lines.

There’s order in those scenes, and it’s not always quite so difficult to determine how to arrange the elements into something pleasing to the eye, the mind and, maybe (if we’re really lucky), the soul.

TOUGH TO FIND ANY OF THAT IN THE WOODS, THOUGH…

I sort of alluded to this a couple of paragraphs ago, from the opposite side of the argument, but I’ll come at it another way here, because I’ve heard this said by people much smarter and better than me: photography is an exclusionary art. Yes, the skill in composition is to arrange things in a pleasing way. But that skill also includes excluding everything that doesn’t fit the plan. Like stray branches, say.

Now fortunately, Lightroom, Photoshop and other processing engines give us a lot of leeway, allowing us to remove a branch here, an ugly fallen log there. Maybe an ex-girlfriend. Doesn’t mean you don’t go ahead and do your “edge patrol”, because Photoshop (and your skill with it) may not always work quite to your liking. So the exclusionary aspect of photography remains in play; after all, it’s better to get something right in camera than to try and fix it in subsequent processing.

But let me reiterate: tough to do all of that in the woods.

So, like life in general, woodland photography is tough, it’s challenging, it always fights back at you, daring you to find a pattern or an isolated special something in all of the havoc among those trees and bushes and branches and logs and leaves.

That said, when it works, woodland photography, it’s dang near magical.

BUT…THAT’S LIFE

And life can play that way too. It’s not always easy. It’s frequently challenging. But man, there are moments…Seeing your wife come down the aisle and realizing you’re the luckiest guy in the world. Seeing your kid for the first time. Crossing the finish line of a physical challenge you never believed you could conquer, or watching a loved one do the same.

Magical.

For the photographers stumbling through the forest, I don’t have a whole lot of advice beyond looking for something that catches your eye, like the glow I spied in the photograph accompanying this post. Or a splash of color or brightness, like the newly sprung leaves in this image. Or a meandering creek or path, like this photo. Fog strung between trees is always good, but tough to find. As they say, it’s tough to see the forest for the trees sometimes, but it’s worth the continued effort.

DON’T WALK AWAY

Similarly, in this time of escalating and mind-boggling death tolls and exponentially increasing infections, it would be easy - too easy - to try to bury yourself in the sand, hunker down at home, and pretend none of it is happening. Heck, I find myself falling prey to that some days; with all of the inescapable negativity bombarding us it’s hard not to. I don’t think it’s odd to not want to see how close we actually are to the world as we know it falling apart on us. Think back to what you were doing just three, four weeks ago and how mundane it was at the time: going to work, to the movies, for a run at the park, to the book store, taking a trip, going to a ballgame. And now stop to think how utterly alien all of that sounds now.

It’s like walking through the woods and not knowing where you are or how to find your way out. Scary.

But as a society and as a civilization, we are going to come through this. And I hope we’re going to come out of it better in some way. I don’t know in what way that will be, but as humans we figure things out and, despite fits and starts and times of great difficulty, many of our own making, we typically make things better in the end (again, see: history, human). I’m counting on that aspect of humanity right now. That we’ll find that splash of color, or that glow in the distance, or that path that leads through the chaos to the other side.

I want to be there to see that happen, to watch us triumph over this thing.

Even if it means walking through the woods to get there.