Behind Michael Nichols’ Redwood Pictures
December 2, 2010 at 5:00 am 3 comments
The October 2009 Issue of National Geographic featured “The Tallest Trees” with wonderful Redwood photographs by Michael “Nick” Nichols. Yan view a slide show of the photographs (and order prints just in time for the holidays!) here.
One of the most dramatic images is actually a mosaic of 84 photographs meticulously stitched together to capture a 1500 year old, 300 foot tree in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park. It wasn’t a simple venture. In a thick forest, you can’t just back up until everything is in frame. Nichols worked with a team of photographers and scientists and ultimately they rigged up a dollies to get the photographs. You can view the final image online here or in person at Annenberg Space for Photography in the Extreme Exposure exhibit.
I write about this now because earlier this week, the photographer posted a behind the scenes account of the process on The Huffington Post. A couple of names familiar to me from The Wild Trees make appearances. You can also see snippets of their process in the following video from National Geographic. Enjoy!
Entry filed under: Photography, redwoods, The Wild Trees, trees.
TGAW 
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real time trading platform | December 2, 2010 at 6:26 am
The video is really awesome.
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geekhiker | December 2, 2010 at 3:46 pm
I can’t wait to get over to that exhibit (they’ve had banners on the streetlights around town for weeks now)… though it’ll probably have to wait until after the Holidays. Hot damn, finally a good reason to be ‘livin in L.A.!
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Kitty | December 4, 2010 at 1:32 pm
That is so super cool!! I haven’t had a chance to look at that issue of National Geographic yet, but now I will definitely check it out! The climbers in brightly colored clothing really do a great job of adding the necessary perspective to make it as awesome (using the literal meaning of the word) of an image as it is. At first (with the first few climbers in red) I thought it might be the same climber in all of the pictures (which in my opinion would make it doubly cool), but as the video panned to the top of the tree, there was at least 1 more climber in yellow. Either way, most excellent!