Kitty in the Redwoods (Patreon)

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After our initial stay in San Francisco for a few days, the first big stop for me and  Kitty Malone on our three week road trip up and down the West Coast last summer was in Humboldt Country, home of weed, cows, dramatic plunging coastal cliffs, and the tallest trees in the world, the Coast Redwood.  

Its one of my favorite places on Earth. I always want to take beautiful photos of models with those amazing trees.  Unfortunately its really difficult!  Trying to capture the height of those trees on their own is insanely challenging (National Geographic spent a shit ton of money and took a team of people a long time to accomplish taking a photo of a redwood titan), and trying to show their scale in relation to a human body (and still really make it a beautiful image of a human body), is even harder.  I tend to do these trips wrong - its hard to get a person to commit to just driving to the Redwoods and hanging out there for several weeks camping while i try to experiment and figure out how I can do this. Instead i make this quick trips just passing through, with only a couple hours or a day or two to do a couple shoots.  Shooting the redwoods is hard.  The light is low, the contrast between light and shadow is harsh, and the trees are just TOO damn big. The struggle continues for me.  Also I have to remember NOT to go in the summer next time - its very pleasant there, but there is far less mist and fog, elements that really make the redwoods have that mystic feeling I am after.

All that said, this time around I was rushing through the redwoods with Kitty! She is always a hoot and we had a great hike on an abandoned trail we had completely to ourselves the whole afternoon in one of my favorite parts of the redwoods. Kitty is tall (at least my height), and statuesque, so it was nice to add her to my slowly growing series of nudes with redwoods.  

Whenever I photograph a person in the redwoods though, I can't just use the trees as a backdrop. They always become the star.  The person I am shooting is just there for scale in a sense, to really be dwarfed by the grandeur of those ancient trees.  This means I shoot hardly any close ups (even the image above was really cropped in from the actual composition)!  I hope you will forgive me this indulgence, even though many of you are here to see the human body, but when shooting those trees they are hard for me to ignore!