Shooting the Shooter - Redwoods

You would be excused for wondering if we actually photographed any redwoods during our Redwoods trip.  Well, we did, of course, but not because the world made it easy on us.  As I’d hinted at previously, the Newton B.  Drury Scenic Parkway (the main parkway to access many of the redwood sites) was closed due to downfall from the winter storms that had recently passed through.  And our trip to Stout Grove in the Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park to the north ran into complications when the backroads route into the park had a locked gate (we later found out because . . . of downfall from the recent winter storms  [are you noticing a pattern here?]), which required us to backtrack and go around through Crescent City and try to approach Stout Grove from the NE.  Fortunately, that route had been cleared a couple of days earlier, which leads us to our next segment of shooting the shooter.

Our unexpected detour wasn’t without consequences.  It put us about an hour behind schedule, which meant that the sun was starting to shine into the tops of the trees and the far side of the river that runs along Stout Grove.  Fortunately, there is a hill that runs along the other side of the grove, which keeps that part of the grove in shadow.  Which is why Ann and I decided to first go down the part of the loop trail that runs closer to the hill than along the river.  

I’d hoped to try to make some grander views of the forest this trip, but as you can see from Ann’s photograph below, anything that included upper elevated areas created unappealing highlights.  So I decided to work with a theme of closely cropped groupings of trees  and to give a sense of being in the forest.  

Many of my images include just one or two trees.  My first image at this location was a square, taken from a position to the right of this one, that visually brought the two low-lying trees (bushes) that are to the right, closer to the interesting trunk pattern on the tree to the left, but obscured the middle trees for the most part.  

As I moved around after that photograph, I realized that I could make a horizontal image that would visually open up the image and reveal more of a forest like feeling.  And if I moved back a bit, I could also get the fallen log that would give a weighted base to everything.  

I wound up having to wait for some clouds to diminish the contrast of the light that hit the second tree from the right as well as the background trees.  The images made with the bright light areas back there are just too bright and take away from the feeling of being amongst the trees.  

It’s difficult to make an image like this work, and I’m not sure I was totally successful with it.  But I’m glad Ann made an image of me making it, in part because it forced me to work with the image to see if, indeed, I had captured the feeling I’d wanted.