Redwoods do tend to be tall, at least the old ones. One problem in making a redwood look tall in a photo is getting back far enough to get the whole tree in view. Other redwoods get in the way. If you get a view down a path that shows the whole tree, the scale is lost. That far back, the person you included to give the tree scale looks like a chipmunk beside a much smaller tree. Getting close and pointing the camera up gets the tree in view, but unless you can convince a friend to climb the tree, you have lost the object that set the scale.

I have been wrestling with this problem for many years. As problems go, there are worse. I have noticed that movie stars rarely go into rehab over such issues. Nonetheless, it is a problem.

We stopped by Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, near Santa Cruz, California, last weekend on the way to the coast. I took this pair of images to splice into a vertical panorama:

I used a very wide angle setting on a 15 mm – 30 mm (equivalent) zoom, but even so the bench and the top of the tree would not fit in one frame. The bench is the object needed to show that, by comparison, we are talking large-type tree. A three image splice would be needed with a normal lens.

Before splicing I darkened the image of the bottom of the tree to get a better exposure match. Automatic Photomerge splicing in Photoshop worked fine, kicking in perspective mode. I then used filter > correct camera distortion > vertical perspective to widen the tree near the top a bit. Next I rotated the image to compensate for my not having held the camera straight. I cropped the image and reset the black level using Enhance > levels. The black level was upset by my pointing the camera towards the sun, even though the orb of the sun was blocked.

The result is:

I won’t claim that the problem of making a redwood look tall is solved forever, but it is a step in the right direction.

We have tutorials on splicing, perspective correction, and back lighting on the QSA site.