Month
June 08
Redwood Coast 1
Redwood National Park covers a lot more territory than I first thought and includes a number of state parks. I was there for about 5 days and upon my return realized that I had seen very little of the park. On the positive side, what a great opportunity to go back next year. It not only covers a large area but a diverse geography including seashore, wetlands, forest, and mountains. We spent most of out time from about 40 miles south of Eureka to several miles north of Orick (all in Humboldt County except Kruze State Park). This leaves a whole lot of redwood forest to the north that we didn't visit .
The main strategy was to "follow the fog". Any forest is impossible to properly expose in mid day sunlight because the contrast between the forest floor and sunlight passing though the trees. Shooting the trees in the early morning can prove successful and low hanging fog along the coast can extend shooting time significantly. I discovered that the best forest photography occurs over a very short period of time when the sun is just beginning to pierce the tree tops but is still not too contrasty. These conditions may only last a couple minutes.
The scene was taken at one of numerous state park beaches just north of Arcata. It was very surreal and there were actually a number of short board surfers in the water. Of course, all of my images that included surfers were less than successful because the fog was little too thick.
I used a 24-70 F2.8 lens at F8 on a carbon fiber tripod and ball head to capture the image above. No special exposure compensation, just the default setting for matrix metering.
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