Morning Light, Redwoods. Muir Woods National Monument, California. August 1, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Light beams shine between redwood trees, Muir Woods National Monument
During essentially the entire month of July, in what is typically my prime time for being in the Sierra and other wild places doing landscape photography, we were instead traveling in the UK, Germany, and Austria. It was a great trip – and I’d do it again in a heartbeat! – but I’ve missed my natural world here in California, and it was about time to return to it. So I marked the first day of August by getting up well before the crack of dawn and heading north across the Golden Gate to spend a morning in the cool and quiet of redwood groves. (To those who have been to Muir Woods when it is, as is too often the case, overrun by tourists from San Francisco, I’ll just say that if you go very and on the right day, you can briefly have the place almost to yourself.)
I was the first or perhaps second person to arrive at Muir Woods, well before the gates were open and the kiosks manned, so I loaded up the camera gear and ambled slowly into the park, taking in the cool air, the quiet, and the soft early morning light. I had to particular photographs in mind, so I just took the time to go slowly and look around. In the end, I came back with perhaps four that I like – which is a pretty good haul! – and the others might be just a bit less iconic than this one. I made this photograph at just about the time I had decided that my work for the morning was done – the sun was getting high in the sky and creating the hard-to-photograph “pizza light” and more visitors were starting to show up. As I turned around to start back I saw this small grove above on the hillside, with some light beams passing through the branches, so I switched lenses and made this photograph.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Jerry, not quite “pizza light” in this shot, though you might say there is a tiny bit of it on a couple of branches that are directly in the light beams.
That said, there was plenty of pizza light around when I shot this – it was just starting to appear, which is why this was pretty much my last shot of the (early) morning before I left. Photographers are odd folks – at about the time everyone else, fresh from a nice breakfast, is showing up… we are leaving!
Dan
(For anyone who doesn’t know, “pizza light” is what you often get when you shoot in sunlit forests – very deep shadows mixed throughout the frame with extremely bright highlights from direct sun. Your eyes can almost deal with this huge dynamic range, but the camera cannot – so you either blow the highlights, completely block the shadows… or even do both!)
Pizza light…?