This is the beginning of a blog I’m starting on my photography and travels. Starting the blog with this image of a river in the Redwoods State Park is exactly how I would like this extension of my work to begin. I chose this image because it is one that I am the proudest of from my recent road trip to California which started in Wisconsin. My girlfriend and I enjoy going out and doing photography in our free time, we also like visiting new places and exploring, all of those combined leaves no option but to get out and travel! One of the places I was most excited to visit during our trip was the Big Basin Redwoods State Park in central California. We had spent the night in Silicon Valley so we woke up early to make the hour drive to the park. It most likely would have been a lot shorter of a drive if it weren’t for all the steep roads on the mountainsides we had to drive through. At what seemed to be the tenth massive mountain we drove up was the entrance to the park where people parked and got maps and information about the trails and campsites. Inside the ranger’s outpost were all kinds of historical and ecological artifacts from the park including a huge slice out of a tree trunk about the size of an extra-large pizza that had been extracted from a fallen tree in the 1980s. There were countless amounts of rings on the trunk serving as a timeline for what was happening around the world at each ring’s time of development. These trees have been around for over three thousand years so it wasn’t surprising seeing rings labeled from the discovery of North America by Christopher Columbus and the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Leaving the information center we took on one of the paved trails that had been closed to cars due to heavy rain leaving the road washed out. At the bottom of the trail, we reached an actual hiking trail where we could hear the river flowing heavy from the rain that nearly soaked us on the way down. After a fifteen minute walk down the muddy trail, we came across a plethora of small waterfalls that embodied the mood of the rainy day in the deep-green forest. This is where I decided to pull out my tripod and try to capture as many of the beautiful streams and falls we walked alongside. I wanted to capture the motion of the water flowing over the fallen trunks and down the rocks but it wasn’t dark enough to do a full long exposure. To make up for how bright it was I decided to take a bunch of shots at ISO 50 (to keep it dark and reduce noise) and 1/60 shutter to get as many exposures in as short of a timespan as possible. Stacking all of the short exposures in-camera through an application resulted in the shot pictured above. This was one of many long exposures I got, they were all taken the same way with similar settings. I feel this shot really captured the mood of the hike on the trail through the giant trees and heavy stream.
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