Claudia and I are in Crescent City scouting for our upcoming redwoods workshop. I love coming back here. The lush forests and wild coast are such a contrast to our mountain home in the central Sierra. The subjects here allow me to try some alternative techniques and approaches to photographing the landscape, but above all I’m trying to convey the feeling of this area, which is very different from Yosemite. The Sierra Nevada, or “The Range of Light,” as John Muir put it, seems like a bright, new, shiny jewel to me, while the temperate rainforests of northern California have a primeval mood that makes you feel as if you’ve traveled back in time a few million years.

Fog helps to convey that primeval mood, and luckily fog is pretty common around here. If you don’t get coastal fog you can sometimes find valley fog or river fog. The photographs here are from two different mornings along the Klamath River. For the image above I looked toward the sun as it was breaking through the fog, and stacked seven- and four-stop neutral-density filters together to get a slow enough shutter speed (eight seconds) to smooth the water and blur the fast-moving clouds. For the photograph below I left the filters off and used a fast shutter speed, as I was just trying to catch fleeting moments of light and mist.

I’m looking forward to the workshop, and to spending another week in this beautiful area!

— Michael Frye

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Michael Frye is a professional photographer specializing in landscapes and nature. He is the author or principal photographer of The Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, Yosemite Meditations, Yosemite Meditations for Women, Yosemite Meditations for Adventurers, and Digital Landscape Photography: In the Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Great Masters. He has also written three eBooks: Light & Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom, Exposure for Outdoor Photography, and Landscapes in Lightroom: The Essential Step-by-Step Guide. Michael 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.