I take most of my pictures close to where I live. Living in Switzerland, nature – including mountains, lakes, and forests – is never far away and offers a wide variety of photographic opportunities throughout the year. Every now and then, however, I need a new impulse, to see something different, to challenge my photographic self in uncharted territory, to photograph something that I have never seen before and may never see again afterwards.
That’s the idea behind the dedicated photography trips I started embarking on a few years ago. This picture stems from one of these trips, to Olympic National Park in the US. I had the chance to spend nine days there, visiting three different locations. And while the weather didn’t really cooperate for landscape photography – literally nine days of cloudless blue skies – I enjoyed the incredible beauty of the landscape and happily took on the double challenge of photographing something unknown to me in mostly harsh summer light.
I came across this waterfall after a long hike in the Quinault Valley, located in the southwestern part of the park. Throughout my stay, I was almost overwhelmed by the lush vegetation. The sheer size of the plants, combined with the delicacy of each leaf and needle, created fantastic and endless photographic opportunities. I immediately saw the potential of this scene, with its numerous green tones and the sunlight illuminating one side of the little valley in which the waterfall is nicely set. After I had shot what I believed to be some compelling images, I couldn’t resist taking a quick bath in the river below the waterfall.
