Sunbeams in the redwood forest
Last year I spent a magical day among foggy redwoods and rhododendrons along the northern California coast, and captured some of my favorite redwood photographs to date. You can see some of those photos here and here.
Claudia and I recently returned from another trip to the redwoods. On our first morning we went to the same area we visited last year, but the fog wasn’t as extensive, and not as many rhododendrons were blooming. We kept hiking, and finally reached some mist, and then something magical happened: the fog began to lift, and sunbeams started filtering through the trees. I captured the “Close Encounters” photograph below, then huffed up a steep trail to the top of a ridge and made the image at the top of this post, with classic godbeams radiating through the trees, then hurried back down, chasing the receding edge of the fog, where I found the scene in the second photograph below.
The next day I rose early and drove north from Arcata. There was low-lying fog right along the shoreline, but it melted away just a few hundred yards inland, so I decided to stay near the coast, and headed for the sea stacks near Trinidad. The fog lent a wonderful atmosphere to these scenes, and I spent a couple of hours exploring various bluffs and beaches. You can find two of the images I made below.
On our last day Claudia and I hiked a new trail (new to us at least). It had sprinkled, but then stopped, and we weren’t planning to go far, so we left our rain jackets in the car. Naturally it started raining again, but then it let up, so we continued. We ended up going twice as far as we’d originally planned, and a steady rain started to fall, so we got thoroughly soaked on the way back to our car. But we loved this trail. We passed one Jurassic Park scene after another, with enormous redwoods around every bend, and thick ferns and rhododendrons underneath. I didn’t get any great photos that day, but I’ll be back.
I love photographing this area, especially the dense, primeval redwood forests. You can walk a few hundred yards from a road and feel like you’ve traveled back in time a million years. And as I wrote last year, when you feel a strong connection with your subject it’s bound to show in your photographs.
—Michael Frye
Close Encounters in the redwoods
Sunbeams through a misty redwood forest
Waves and sea stacks near Trinidad
Misty sea stacks with bonsai trees near Trinidad
Related Posts: Capturing a Mood; The Third Dimension in Photography; Photographs That Inspire
Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author and photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters, plus the eBooks Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom, and Exposure for Outdoor Photography. He has written numerous magazine articles on the art and technique of photography, and his images have been published in over thirty countries around the world. Michael has lived either in or near Yosemite National Park since 1983, currently residing just outside the park in Mariposa, California.
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That first shot is brilliant! Well done Michael! I hope to get to that location someday…
Thanks Andrew! It is a great area…
Michael, as always, excellent images. We also have some fog here in Colorado Springs but it is from the fires in New Mexico and northern Colorado! It did, however, make for a great sunset last night but I didn’t have my camera handy 🙁
James, smoke is highly underrated by photographers in general, I’ve made some great images with smoke. So where was your camera… ? 🙂
These are beautiful! A friend and I are heading up that way at the end of the month. It’s my first time going to the North Coast so I’m excited to photograph such a beautiful place!
Good luck Jeremy – hope you have a great time!
Talent, shows, Michael. Really evocative of place.
And from a technical standpoint, you’ve managed to handle the shooting-into-the-sun problem. I’m still working on it 🙂
Eric, processing these images was rather ridiculously easy in Lightroom 4. Of course you have to get the exposure right, and there’s potential lens flare to deal with, but there are plenty of trees to hide the sun behind in a redwood forest!
I spent several years living in/around the redwoods, and it’s not as easy as one might think to get images like these–visualizing is only a part of the imaging process. I was lucky a few days in the Sonoma County redwood region though, and got some that I, to this day, enjoy. 😉 They were enhanced by the smoke from a nearby campfire, so there’s color that I don’t normally capture in shots like this. I don’t know if I can put a link in here, so I used the website linky-dink box. Hope that’s acceptable–I thoroughly enjoyed your post.
c
Charlene, it’s perfectly fine to post a link here. It’s easiest just to paste the whole URL into your comment. Don’t worry, if someone starts posting spammy links I’ll just delete them. 🙂 Nice photo!
Those sunbeams look magical – gorgeous photos!
Thanks Claire!
Love the photos of the sunbeams through the (misty) redwood forest. They made me feel as though I was there myself – I could smell the smells and feel the air while looking at them.
Thanks for the info concerning where I was in Yosemite. Just finished reading Exposure for Outdoor Photography. I appreciate your clear and concise explanations of types of situations that photographers commonly are presented with. I;ve learned a lot from your writings and refer to your books often.
Thanks very much Carol for the kind words – I’m glad you find this stuff helpful! It’s interesting that you should mention the smells, because I was noticing that redwood forests have a distinct scent, sort of like damp vanilla.
Michael, just amazing! Thank you for continuing to inspire and challenge !
Thank you Dale!
Wow! These are brilliant images Michael! Absolutely outstanding!
Thanks Michael!
Those sunbeams are breath taking. Fog definitely creates a magical mood in the forest. Thanks for the inspiration, Michael!
Thank you Vivienne – and I totally agree about fog, I love the stuff.
Dear Michael, Thanks for showing your beautiful fog photos. I look forward to some New England fog to try my best with capturing the foggy beauty.
Thanks John, and good luck with the New England fog.
Very beautiful, Michael. Thanks for the inspiration – and the education.
Thanks Ian!
Michael – thanks for posting your wonderful work – truly world class stuff. Great to meet you in Klamath.
Thanks very much Steve! it was great to meet you and Colleen, and Claudia and I hope we’ll run into you again.
Nice work, Michael. Definitely has that primeval feeling… It’s been a while since my class with you in the Valley (Fall ’09). But, I have been shooting quite a bit since then up here in AK. Best, Ralph
Thank you Ralph. It’s nice to hear from you, and I’m glad to hear that you’ve been making lots of photos up there.
Great work again Michael in that magical land of redwoods,rhodies, and fog.
Glad you were able to get up there again with Claudia.
I was able to make it up there near the end of last month to shoot in some fog and although a lot of the Rhodies in the old growth forest areas had not bloomed yet we were able to see a lot of different blooming wildflowers including two different types of trillium plants. Plan to go up there again very soon and hope to capture some of that magical fog softened light (like your incredible last year shots) with some blooming Rhodies. Do you think there will be still some blooming now? I also enjoy all the lichen growing on all the Sitka trees and hanging down from branches, soaked with drops from the moist foggy air.
Thank you Wayne – glad you like these. I think there may still be some rhodies blooming. When we were there June 1-3 most were in bloom, and some were past, but in the dense forests in Del Norte SP some were just coming out, so they may still be in good shape. Overall it does not seem like a great year for rhododendrons though.
Beautiful. Would love to see a tutorial on how you processed the file. Very luminous.
Thanks Jay! I think about that tutorial… 🙂
Michael,
Thank you for the wonderful ebook on taking the right exposure.
Have you considered doing a 2nd ebook on using LR 4 on the same images in the first ebook? I for one would jump on the opportunity to purchase this 2nd ebook.
Thanks Walter – glad you like the Exposure eBook. I’ve had a lot of requests for a second “Light & Land” eBook using Lightroom 4, so it’s definitely something I’d like to do.