I Almost Gave Up Hope! Landscape Photography in the REDWOODS

Oh, it's so beautiful in here. Hello, everyone. Michael Shainblum here. And welcome to the Oregon, California border. We're on the coast right now. And I'm in the Redwoods, which is one of my favorite places not to photograph, though. It's one of my favorite places just to walk around and hike. I think this is so beautiful in here. But I will say, I've visited here countless times over the years. And I have never, not once, come up with a composition that I actually liked. I can never do photographic justice to just how beautiful this place is. And I'm kind of curious if you have a place like that. I'd like to hear from you. Do you have a location that, even though you love going there and you've visited multiple times, you just can't seem to get something that works photographically? Please let me know in the comments. But either way, I'm going to keep coming back here. Who knows, maybe this is my year. Maybe this is the year that I finally get a Redwood photo that I can put in my portfolio. So even though I mentioned I do love hiking at this location, I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a bit discouraging to visit this place over and over again and never get a photograph. So along with this adventure, I also share a bit of advice on how to stay inspired and not get too discouraged when you don't get a photograph at a place. Towards the end, I also share some of my favorite new images that I captured on the Oregon coast during this trip. I really hope you enjoy the video. Oh, you know what? I haven't taken a picture yet, but I just took out my Sigma 100-400 lens because there's a lot of very cool things happening right now. And I want to at least just look in the viewfinder to see what they would look like if I can compress some of these scenes. Interesting. I find when I'm looking around with the telephoto lens, I do a little bit better scouting when I'm handheld. You know, I can be a bit quicker. I just bump my ISO, take some test shots. And then if I think that, OK, that ISO is a little bit too high, and I found a composition that I really like, then I'll pull out the tripod, bring the ISO down. I think this may be a little bit too long of a lens right here. I think I should pull out the wide angle. So we are going to switch now to the 16-35. Yep, that's working quite a bit better. So this is my first image captured with the 16-35 lens. And this is meant to be more of a test shot than anything else. But to be honest, I kind of like the way it came out. I think what interested me in this photograph was the character of that middle tree. I really liked the shapes and textures here. After shooting this one, I switched up my perspective and zoomed in a bit. And here's what I shot. So in this direction, the sun was almost piercing through the fog. And it wasn't enough to create light rays, but it did create this really soft glow towards the top of the photograph. You can actually see the tree that was in the middle of the previous photograph to the right of the frame. Wow, that's so cool. It's really, really pretty in here. And I'm finding it a little easier to shoot all this stuff handheld. I've got image stabilization in the lens. And I'm really just still trying to find a composition that speaks to me. But it's just amazing. I think I just need to get around this bush right here. If only I was taller. I just need to be a foot taller. Actually, you know what I could do? There we go. Is this the proper form? So even though this image I was just trying didn't really work, I went down the path a little bit further. And then I found this. This image ended up being one of my favorites from the shoot. And it was also one of the images that I was the most uncertain about while I was photographing it. I thought the scene looked cool in person, just the different shapes, the textures, the colors. But I wasn't sure if maybe the composition would be a little bit too messy once I got back to Lightroom. But I was pleasantly surprised with the way this one turned out. All right, this looks pretty good at 16. Oh, actually, it looks really nice at about 35 millimeters. I think I'm going to actually pull out the tripod for this one. And I'll show you the composition. It's a simple composition, but I like it quite a bit. I'm going to pop out the tripod. All right, so here's kind of what the scene looks like at around 16 mil. But when I zoom in here, you just kind of isolate some of these nice vertical shapes with the horizontal and diagonal thinner shapes of the branches and all the foliage in there. And it was a little foggier earlier. It was actually a lot foggier earlier. But I did shoot it earlier, which is good. So here's the version of the photograph without any fog. The fog had completely dissipated. You can see all the different layers of trees all the way towards the background. And the whole image is just extremely chaotic. There's not a lot of structure going on here. But let me show you just how different this looks before the fog dissipated. So here's the version with the fog to add that extra atmosphere to the image to help separate out some of the layers. I also really liked some of the backlighting in this photograph. I mean, I already knew this, but it's amazing how much fog adds to the shot. I mean, the composition with fog looked quite nice. And then without fog, everything gets lost. All those layers get lost. Suddenly, this composition that I had doesn't work anymore. I'm just wondering if the fog is going to come back, though. I feel like I should have shot more when it was foggy a few minutes ago. I didn't realize that was going to be such a fleeting moment. I thought the fog was going to stick around longer. Huh, interesting. Well, I guess we'll just have to wait and see if the fog comes back. And in the meantime, I'll look for more compositions. Looks like it's misty down there. So I think if we keep heading down this trail, we should meet up with the fog again. I definitely think that's worth a shot. Let's see what we can get. Here's just a quick composition that I captured on the path down the hill. And as I was walking down this path, it got darker and darker. And I decided to try something a little bit different. So this time, I'm trying some ultra-wides with these ferns here in the foreground, because you can get some really interesting leading lines. And then you just have this subtle glow of the mist in the background with the redwoods. So it's kind of what I'm trying here. I've tried a few different variations. I've tried a panorama, did an exposure blend. But I'm doing mostly f11 to f16, so they don't have to focus stack this, because that sounds absolutely miserable right now. So I'm trying my best not to have to focus stack. And so doing the larger apertures is going to help with that. See just how beautiful that glow is in the background. And then you've got the ferns down here. Even just stepping half a foot this direction or that direction changes the way the leading lines work. So we'll have to see how it comes out. So here's the final photograph that I was just working on. And this is actually a two-image panorama. So I did two vertical images, one for the top redwoods, and then one for the ferns down below. Normally, I stick to a 2 by 3 crop when I'm doing vertical images. But this one just felt like it needed to be a little bit taller. So I went with a 9 by 16 crop for this image. Overall, I really like the symmetry here, that nice glow that's coming from the horizon framed by the two redwoods that are a little bit closer to the camera. And then the symmetrical lead-in of the ferns down towards the foreground. Looks so beautiful with the mist swirling around right now. I was fully prepared today to not get an image. I was like, I'm going to go for a walk and just bring my gear. And I've been pleasantly surprised. I think the ultimate test is when I put these into Lightroom and look at these on the computer. Am I going to have the same fondness for them as when I'm here? That's the ultimate test. All those times where you're sitting there in field like, this is the one, it's amazing. But really, it's your excitement for being here. It's your excitement for how cool it is in here. And then when you open up Lightroom and you realize, wait a minute, that's not that cool. I thought it was way cooler when I was there. That is the life of a landscape photographer. So here's my final image of the evening. This time, a 13 second exposure taken at 35 millimeters. So after years of trying to shoot these redwoods, I would say this was a pretty successful outing. I played around with a lot of different techniques, tried some new compositions, and was able to get some really nice atmosphere through the trees. It's really easy to get discouraged by a place when you go there so many times and you come away empty handed. I mean, it's happened to me a bunch at different places and the redwoods was always that one location I was never able to capture. I mean, this is a place I had been visiting since 2012. So I guess as cheesy as it sounds, maybe the lesson to this is to just never give up because eventually if you put in enough work and enough time, you'll get the shots that you were looking for. Maybe not the first time, maybe not the second time, maybe not the 20th time, but eventually it will happen. The best advice I can give for not getting discouraged about not getting a shot is really well thinking about the photography one, as a scouting trip. Each time you visit somewhere and you look around and you explore, you get a little bit closer to getting those photographs and it makes you more prepared for the next time you visit the location. And even if you didn't get a photo or really scout, at least you spent some time in nature, which is really the reason most of us do this anyways, is to just get out in the nature, go for a hike, clear your head. So try not to get too caught up in the image making part of it. Eventually, again, if you put in the time, you're gonna get what you were looking for. So after this, I wandered around the Oregon coast with some friends and I did capture a few images that I really liked. Here's some moments from that adventure. So this image was shot the morning after that Redwoods adventure and it ended up being my favorite image for my entire Oregon trip. And I titled this one Sea to Summit because when I was staring at the scene, all I could see is the layers of hills and mountains that looked like they had been painted by the tides. I thought this was such a cool composition and a really nice contrast from the cooler tones in the water and the warmth of the sand. I took 50 different versions of this scene to get the right water flow and to get the right sand patterns and this one ended up being my favorite. Really hope you all enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel for more. And yeah, I'll catch you in the next one.