Michael Nichols is an award winning National Geographic photographer. Not a bad job one would imagine. At the end of 2012 he was given the minor assignment of taking a picture of one of the biggest trees in the world – The President – a Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park, USA. It was already a tall order (about 75m), but was made even taller by not choosing a lovely clear, sunny day for the shoot, but rather the middle of a snow storm. Individual trees are quite difficult to photograph at the best of times, much harder in forests where as soon as you start moving backwards to get more in the shot, other irksome trees start to block your view. How do you get around this? Well you have a team of photographers climb nearby trees and take section shots for you. You then sit in a tent at the bottom of the tree and wait for the 126 digital files to be pinged back down to you for stitching together into a final composite. This is what he produced. He named his good work ‘The President’s crown’. To honour International Day of Forests yesterday we thought it would be nice to revisit this amazing shot.
Utterly stunning! I sat for ages just staring at this image! How about a project making a massive banner of this and draping from Nelson’s Column in London and similar landmarks in the World’s cities to feed appreciation of trees and forests?! Dr M