How to Photograph a Redwood Tree — From Duff to Overstory

photograph a redwood-tree-trunk — How to photograph a redwood tree? This is all that my modest point and shoot could capture of these two trees at Muir Woods. *Photos by Barbara Newhall*

I played hooky from my blog yesterday.

Instead of sitting down at my desk to write, I headed off for a day amidst the redwood trees of Muir Woods, accompanied by my hiking buddy and hundreds of other nature-starved pandemic survivors.

The ancient beings of Muir Woods — some are 800 and 1000 years old — are huge.

I tried to take a picture of one of them, then another, and another. It couldn’t be done.

Not that the coastal redwoods of Muir Woods are camera shy. Anything but. They’ll stand stock still, right in front of you, massive, unmoving and totally photogenic.

But there’s no way to squeeze the vast height — 250 feet in some cases — of one of these trees into the lens of a modest little point and shoot like mine.

So, how to photograph a redwood tree and get the whole thing into the picture — from bottom to top, duff to overstory?

You make a video, of course. Here’s mine.

Read about a hill in Michigan and its trees at “Eagle Top — A Wild Place Tamed.” A tree falls in California in “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder. But What If There Is No Beholder?”