Finding mystery in a forest

I enjoy walking through the woods – there is a calmness and a sense of peace and one of my favorite walks is quite a long way away from the snow-covered landscape currently outside my home in West Virginia! That walk is around the Wai Koa plantation on the gorgeous Hawaiian island of Kauai. How I wish I was there now! I guess I will have to rely on my memories (and my photos) to bring back the warmth of that place. The walk itself ends up at a beautiful little garden that has been formed around an old stone dam across the river:

But the question I am exploring today is one of how to photograph a forest? Your eye can focus on details or scan across the scene, but in a photograph, it can be a bit messy and not at all clear what we are expecting the viewer to focus on. Everything is there and often sharp and in focus, but nothing is very obvious as the subject. You can’t see the wood for the trees!

This image from this loop trail is a case in point. The trail passes through some very large mahogany tree plantations, all neatly arranged in lines as far as the eye can see:

This was actually a panorama created from several images with the camera on a tripod (yes, I do carry a tripod on walks!) and rotated round for each image. And the focus is on the center tree because it is larger and lighter than the rest, but there is so much detail to attract and distract the eye!

My first attempt to simplify it was to use a technique in Photoshop called Motion Blur. You can create an effect in the camera where you move the camera vertically as you are taking the image itself, but this is not feasible for a panorama. Motion blur creates something similar, and you end up with a more simplified view of the forest:

This is much more worthy of a place on a wall. I think the first one would be great in a hotel – large scale on the wall by the elevators, for instance, but this one is much more intriguing.

I took this a step further by using an oil painting program that creates an impressionist effect.

This is my personal favorite of the three, and I think would look great as a canvas print, or as a framed canvas print perhaps! What do you think - which treatment do you prefer?