Sequoia Trees

This past Labor Day weekend Husband and I took our dog on a little excursion to Sequoia National Forest. Sequoia trees are big. In case you didn't know.

In fact, they are HUGE.

They are also a little odd look at. They're really tall, so you're craning your head up and up and up to see to the top (particularly if you're excessively small like I am). But there aren't any branches at the bottom, so they're just straight for a few hundred feet and then suddenly they get scraggly branches that slowly fill out. Now, there are obvious advantages to not having low branches when you are a very large tree. The amount of sunlight is significantly diminished at the bottom of a very large tree, so it would take more energy to keep the branches alive than the branches would bring to the tree. It also accounts for the scraggly nature of the lowest branches. However, in a beauty contest the sequoia simply wouldn't win.

Nevertheless these trees are majestic. When you're that tall you have to be regardless of how awkward you appear at first. Taking big things poses a bit of a problem when you take pictures. Now, I assume that these problems can potentially be solved by different lenses, but for me, I don't have that option. So I have to figure out the angle at which to get as much of the tree as possible without it (or me?) looking silly. Now, in a forest, it's almost impossible to back up enough to capture the entire tree straight on (also, that makes for a bit of a boring picture...but that's the topic for another post). So I got close to the tree, sat on the ground, and looked up.





















Now, the two pictures above are of the same tree. This tree was in the middle of our campsite in Sequoia National Forest. We camped over Labor Day Weekend with our dog at about 6000 ft in the mountains (yes, there were bears). Back to the trees: one of them is "photoshopped" and one of them is not. It's pretty obvious which one is more natural. Now, I usually run my pictures through iphoto just to boost colors, but with the one on the left I distorted the colors. I have them both because I'm not sure which one I like more. To be honest, the one on the right isn't a great picture, which is why I distorted the one the left. I like that the one on the left looks a little "modern" or "retro" (whichever term you'd rather use....oddly, they are mostly interchangeable). But I'm not sure I like that look with a sequoia tree. My point here is that even a "bad" picture can be something worthwhile. I played with the picture because I didn't like it.

I tried again with this picture. I lost some of the perspective of height....honestly, I don't think this tree necessarily looks bigger than your average pine tree, but I got a more interesting picture. Because my camera lacks a lot of the fancy features DSLR cameras have, I like to play with light. I know my image will be distorted because I can't filter as easily as an SLR camera can. I also know my colors will be washed out. So I positioned myself into the sun (I made sure that the sun was at least partially blocked by the branches) and took a picture. I opened my f-stop to a pretty wide opening (3.2) so I would get more light, but I reduced my ISO so my picture wouldn't absorb all the light that was getting in (at night your ISO should be really high but in the daytime it should be pretty low). I also ran the picture through iphoto and further washed out the colors and made the picture "warm." I like this picture a lot. I know it is a sequoia so I know how huge it is, but I really like the effect of the sun through the trees, it feels like this picture came from a forest.

Now, one last picture to get a sense of the grandeur of sequoia trees. This one, I think, works. Again, in iphoto I washed out the colors (particularly the sky), and I didn't touch the shadows. So the tree looks dark. I also played with the sun, you can almost see the sun on the right of the picture. I am clearly less close to the tree than I was with the first picture I took, but I still sat on the ground. Also, I think the other trees in the picture help to frame the tree that is important. This is an interesting picture. Your eye necessarily follows the tree up to the top, and the tree looks as big as it really is.

You may not like the picture (or any of the pictures of sequoia trees), and that's all right. One of the reasons I didn't start with monumental pictures (like the Roman Forum or a castle or the Eiffel Tower or the Great Wall of China) is that everyday things can be beautiful and that pictures are essentially subjective. It's relatively easy to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower (and I suppose it's also easy to take a picture of sequoia trees), but I wanted to show something that doesn't appear in every coffee table book. Those pictures will come later.

Husband, dog, and I went on several hikes while we were up in Sequoia, and I brought my camera along. Husband has definitely come to loathe the camera, since I'm pretty sure it doubles the amount of time we spend doing any particular activity. We hiked along a river and up a mountain on two separate occasions. Dog loved the hikes. She was very, very happy to be in the woods with us, and she always stayed close. We had one minor bear sighting (very minor: the bear was pretty far away and ran off when we got close), and Dog stayed close to us (Dog does have a name: Sirena, but since I'm not giving Husband a name, Dog doesn't get one in the blog either). I, for the record, love camping. I love getting out of the city and being in the middle of all the space. I feel free. (For the record, I LOVE the city. I love all the different people and the different things to do. I am neither a city nor a country girl. I need a little of both in my life).

This is one of the pictures I took on our hike up the mountain. It's a good picture, not my favorite of a mountain, but I do like the trees that I caught. They look big. You also get a sense of the landscape, and the vastness of the forest around us. I thought I would share it since we're talking about trees and big things today. I think the sky is a little big in this picture, I should have move the horizon line up a little bit. I didn't because of the height of the trees in the picture. As a personal preference, I usually don't like things to touch the edges of the picture exactly. I have no problem cutting things off, but I don't like things to be precisely measured into the picture. I think it makes the picture look less organic. And I love pictures that feel organic (which has little to do, for me anyways, with whether or not I modify something in photoshop and it looks modified). The beauty of photography is that you are capturing something that is already there. It is your unique vision of what that looks like that makes your pictures so special. Some are good, and some are bad, but every picture tells a story of where you are and what you see.