By Dan Bloom, Producer
When explorer Mike Fay (bio: here) and photographer Michael ‘Nick’ Nichols talk about Redwood trees, it sounds like they’re discussing their own family. Lots of people have looked upon these wooden giants and rushed to cut them down, coveting their durable & rot-resistant wood. But to Fay & Nichols, the value of Redwood trees cannot be measured in dollars and cents: they are the tallest trees on earth, some have been growing for thousands of years, they absorb and store massive amounts of carbon dioxide and they’re stunningly beautiful.
Mike Fay recently recently completed the Redwood transect, a trek from the southernmost Redwood at Big Sur California to the northernmost across the Oregon state line. Learn more about the Redwood transect at this site. Fay is a Conservationist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and an explorer-in-residence with the National Geographic Society.
You can read more about Fay, Nichols and Redwoods in the October issue of National Geographic Magazine. You can watch “Explorer: Climbing Redwood Giants” on the National Geographic Channel Saturday at 7pm and Tuesday at 6pm. Learn more at their website. Here’s a video of Mike Fay on the Redwood transect.
Michael Nichols is an editor-at-large with National Geographic and was the principal photographer on the Redwood story. Here are some of his photographs, see more at this site.
-Dan Bloom
Just recently saw a video where Nichols explained more about this, including the 3 Canon cameras and 35mm lenses. They showed a large photo of the redwood in a church.
Apparently someone was shining a large flashlight to fine-tune lighting for some of the photography.
The .kmz file was interesting to find and view in Google Earth, to see where they meandered through the redwoods.
One thing mentioned in the Nat Geo Explorer show, was how redwoods can make more wood per tree when they are older.
This has been an incredibly good autumn for redwood forest education.
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