The Work
The redwoods were dark. The maple was not.
I had been walking the trail for about an hour — the canopy so dense overhead that the forest floor holds onto the night longer than the sky does. Then, through a gap somewhere above, a beam of diffused morning light came through and landed on a single bigleaf maple. The tree lit up: green foliage, moss-covered limbs, the bark still damp from the previous day’s fog. The surrounding redwood trunks stayed in shadow. I had maybe ten minutes before the gap closed and the light redistributed itself across the canopy.
What the image holds is not a dramatic landscape. There is no horizon, no sky, no vanishing point. There is one tree, lit from above, in a dark forest. That’s what I wanted.
The Location
Redwood National Park occupies 138,000 acres of Humboldt County, Northern California. It protects the world’s tallest trees — coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) that can stand over 350 feet and live past 2,000 years. Beneath them, where filtered light occasionally reaches the forest floor, bigleaf maples (Acer macrophyllum) grow in the gaps — deciduous, moss-covered, and entirely different in scale and temperament from their ancient neighbors.
The image was made in May 2022, when the maple foliage was at its freshest. The fog that characterizes this coastline keeps the forest damp year-round; moss colonizes every surface. What looks like a painting is a single unmanipulated frame on a Fujifilm GFX medium format system.
The Edition
Discovery Edition. Edition of 50, hand-signed and numbered. Each acquisition is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity with hologram provenance seal. Edition 47 of 50 available. 3 sold.
The Discovery Edition is curated to offer an intentional, democratic entry point into the Light & Shadows archive. Released in a structured, mid-sized edition of 50, it preserves absolute archival integrity and fine art standards while allowing a broader circle of collectors to live with the work before an image is permanently retired.
The Capture
System: Fujifilm GFX Medium Format
Lens: 120mm
Technique: Single frame
Date: May 2022
Exposure / ISO / Aperture: [TBC — to be added from original EXIF]
GPS Region: Redwood National Park, Humboldt County, California
The Print
Forest Light is the most tonally demanding image in the collection to print in one specific way: the greens. The foliage of the maple sits in a narrow warm-green window — not lime, not olive, not yellow-green — and that window is different on every uncalibrated monitor. On Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm, the colour management is done to the original capture, not to what screens imply. The moss on the bark holds its blue-green undertone. The background redwood trunks hold their warm brown without going red.
For framing: the vertical format recommends a slim natural-wood frame — white oak or pale ash — with a linen-white mat. The image needs breathing room. In a contemporary interior, face-mounted to acrylic, the backlit quality of the foliage gains depth that the matte paper version cannot match.
