The reach of a an old growth cedar far exceeds our grasp. Canon EOS XSi EF-S 17-85 at 17mm f/5.6 1/60 ISO 200
The stillness that settles over you as you walk into an old growth forest is almost tangible. Not the tourist forests, the museum forests but a real portion of a real forest; one that you have walked for three days to get to. That kind of forest has a very real sense of presence. You can almost feel it breathing, and you are made stronger by pulling its oxygen into your own lungs.
It is so very difficult to get a sense of the size of one of these large old growth cedars, these 300 year old trees. I stood with my back to this one and twisted backwards with my camera over my head to look up towards the top. The site is dizzying and I wanted an image that reflected that fact. I had on a wide angle lens and I put the base of the camera against the tree so that the trunk would fill the bottom of the frame. The wide angle perspective pulls all of the other trees towards the same vanishing point. Recently as I was preparing this image for this blog post I played around with rotating the image to have the big cedar emerge from the bottom of the frame instead of the top but I really like the slight sense of disorientation that comes from having the big tree emerge from the top of the frame.
-Russell Berg