Portraits of Ancient Western Red Cedars
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Forest Guardian
Neverlasting
Grove of Time
A Beautiful Snag
Chameleon
Husk
The Wickenden Giant
One of my ongoing projects is to create a gallery of tree portraits. Specifically, portraits of old growth Western red cedars. Although they’ll almost certainly outlive everyone alive right now, they won’t live forever and I love the idea of artistically documenting them. We’re fortunate to have a significant amount of Western red cedars in the Vancouver area, but many require some hunting to find. The Wickenden Giant is the perfect example of that! My first attempt at locating it with Matt Jackisch resulted in coming back empty handed. I made a second attempt with Blake (armed with more clarified information about its rough location) and it was a success!
Unfortunately, the weather wasn’t exactly the greatest for forest photography, but the light was nice enough to make it work. My primary goal was to capture the textures, and the feeling of the tree almost being a wall. Like with my other images, I painted in glow/mist in the background to increase the sense of depth and desaturated some of the shadows. Single exposure at 28mm, f/13, 0.6s, ISO 100. Fun fact: of all the places I've photographed around the world, this area is the place the least amount of people have been to!
Old, But Not Forgotten
While hiking, I somehow almost forgot to show Blake this tree, but remembered to stop by on our way out. Conservative estimates place it at a minimum of 700 years of age. It’s also one of the biggest I’ve ever seen in person - it’s pretty much a forest leviathan. It’s impossible to translate the sheer scale (and experience) to an image, but this is my best attempt. Oh, and I should probably mention… this is actually the small side of the tree! The other side is almost twice as wide.
I picked this angle because it really shows off the awesome textures and colors in the bark, and has a nice foreground tree. My lens was still fogged up for this one (I swear the 14-24mm takes forever to defog) but it helped add some much needed atmosphere. Two exposures were used to create this. One for the foreground and one for the rest of the frame. To help increase the atmosphere, mood and depth, I painted in some glow in the background. I also desaturated some of the shadow areas, for similar reasons!
The Survivor
Shooting in the forest is notoriously difficult, especially when not using something like a waterfall or a stream as your subject. But it's something I'm really trying to get better at and this scene proved to be great practice. This was one of my first real attempts at shooting an ancient Western red cedar - my favourite type of tree due to the monstrous sizes they grow to and the unique ways that they contort and adapt to their environment. You'd think that due to their size, it would be easier to make an image of them, but I find it's actually harder!
They're so huge that it's difficult to convey the scale properly... for example, those burls on the tree are human sized! This is a blend of two exposures to maximize sharpness, and was taken in the early afternoon. When shooting in forests, pretty much any time of day can work, but I actually prefer the late morning or early afternoon because there's lots of light at your disposal. Creating depth and separation in the absence of fog is much easier in these conditions.