In September 2017 I visited California with my wife, to see some of our closest friends and to photograph some of the most diverse architecture, scenery, landscapes and people I've ever seen. The good people at Fujifilm UK were kind enough to lend me their digital medium format camera, the GFX50S, and a couple of fantastic lenses. I'm putting together a series of blog posts that look at some of the places I visited. If you like what you see, please give my Instagram and Facebook pages a like/follow, as I'll be posting more recent content on there over the next while.
My last post looked at an amazing trip to Bodie State Historic Park but in this post I'm going to look at a short trip into Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, suggested by my friends Sean and Ellyce, who hosted us in San Francisco. The oldest tree, featured below, is estimated to be over 1400 years old! Below you can see it sitting west of the 101, north west of Santa Rosa and Rohnert Park.
We didn't have a huge amount of time at this location but I'd seen some other shots that had been taken by Ellyce, in the area, so I was excited to see the scale of the place, and test the dynamic range of the camera's sensor with some challenging backlit scenes.
It was really hot that day, over 30 centigrade, but under the shade of the forest it was nearer 13 or 15 degrees. I wasn't complaining - I'm Scottish so I was wilting a bit in the heat. We wandered into the forest and I just loved using the wide end of the 32-64 f4 lens on the GFX, and the camera captured the most detail in the shadows of any camera I have ever used. In some ways, it was quite hard to not produce those passé HDR images when I came to edit the raw files - I had to keep reminding myself that deep shadows are a good thing.
I'm going to start the main batch of images with a quick portrait that I snapped of my wife, Toni. Even at f4, there's a discernible 'pop' to the image, although that's helped by the contrasting colours in the frame.
The scale of the place was pretty astounding, as shown by the minuscule people in the first image below. Combined with the sudden drop in temperature from the road aside gave the place somewhat of an otherworldly quality, almost serene and quiet like you get after snowfall.
Despite the lush greens in the area, I really enjoyed processing these images in monochrome, pulling the highlights way back in Lightroom to draw out tonnes of detail. That's not normally an editing style I'd go for - I tend to favour grit and contrast, but it was just so much fun to show off the detail from the GFX files. I feel like these could be prints that you'd pour over, looking ever closer?
I'm particularly fond of the top right image above. Not too sure why, but it looks so 3D and 'real' when viewed at high resolution - there's a natural and organic quality to the rendering from that lens which I've not been able to replicate before, or since. While the 32-64 lens doesn't offer supremely close focus, the high resolution files give the ability to crop in tight without any loss of image quality.
Colonel Armstrong, the tree featured in the top right above, is the oldest tree in the forest and is approximately 1400 years old. For a country that always surprises me with its 'newness', it was cool to see something far older than anything made within the era of the United States of America. Pictured on the bench are Sean, my friend and guide, and Toni, my wife. It's not every day you sit on a bench facing a tree that was around in 700 AD. The GFX also does admirably as a snapshot camera, which isn't something you can say about a lot of medium format digital systems. Overkill, perhaps, but fun.
Finishing this photoset are a few more mono images from inside the forest, including one of expert map reader Sean and some younger trees. Seeing the light flash through these thinner tree trunks was, in some ways, a better photographic subject than the bigger, older trees. After this we headed back out to visit another vineyard, which will be the subject of the next blog in this series!
Words can't quite do justice to how astonishing this looks at 50mp. The detail is tactile and your eyes just get sucked into the frame. Unfortunately, even a jpeg at full resolution is over 30mb so it's a non-starter for blogging!
I took great pleasure in revisiting one of my favourite LPs of 2017 while going through these pictures. I was introduced to The War On Drugs by my friend Sean prior to the release of their last record, Lost In The Dream, and I was so excited to listen to this new LP, A Deeper Understanding, on this trip. It combines the best of romantic, nostalgic American rock with melancholy and occasionally stunning guitar solos. Also, the video above, Holding On, is one of the most beautiful and saddest videos to come out in the past few years.