Stand Tall

Stand Tall by I Nancy, on Flickr

Today’s hike was at Malibu Creek State Park with good photo buddies Jerry, Connie, and Hutch. Jerry, Connie and I were trying out our gear management systems (err, I just made that up – how we carry our gear) for a trip to Utah that we are taking at the end of the month. I was testing out how I would carrying my new Induro CT114 carbon fibre tripod and Acratech GP Ballhead. With the whole setup weighting a bit less than 4lbs they were both a pleasure to use and to carry. I mostly just carried it across my back draped diagonally across my body. The biggest hitch was managing how the camera, tripod and hat straps were intertwined.

“Gear is good, but vision is better” (thank you David DuChemin) so I must get to talking about my vision for these images.

In September it is starting to feel like fall in most parts of the US, but not in beautiful sunny southern California. Here is is still full on summer. Highs between upper 80 and 100 F. Today was about 84. The sun is bright and harsh and all the bad stuff for taking photographs. I’m not one to make my living from HDR images, but I knew before I left the house that HDR was a technique I would need today to keep the exposure and lighting under control. Also, this little grove of redwoods and just that, a little grove. A little anomaly in what is mostly brush, sycamores, and California oaks. And in comparison to the big redwoods in northern California, they are quite small. I wanted to exaggerate their height and isolate them to make it feel like we were surrounded by redwoods. Setting up the tripod I was conscious to keep the sky as filled with branches as possible and create some dramatic angles. f/9 for good depth of field, 28mm for fairly wide angle. In this shot I setup specifically to shoot into the sun. It is actually one of my favorite things to do to add additional drama and power to a shot. Since I was shooting HDR, I knew I could recover the tree shadows in the exposure brackets.

Here are two more from the day: one capturing the spread of the branches and the other as if the redwood was posing for a classic portrait.

Braching Out by I Nancy, on Flickr