Novaculata: Back to the Redwoods

Morning Light at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

We're back in the Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park in Northern California with this piece created in the warm, early morning sunlight streaming through the high mist and the trees. This work is titled novaculata for the slivers of light knifing through the forest and illuminating the forest floor, redwood trunks and branches.

Provenance: Phase One XT • IQ4.150 • Rodenstock 32mm

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Further south along the California coast, another expression of redwood endurance: the fire-scarred redwoods of Founders Grove, Humboldt.

From a southern grove, a different kind of renewal: an old-growth redwood trunk and the new growth around it.

For a quieter, less-visited corner of the redwood world: the quiet of Decker Creek in the Bull Creek Wilderness.

From the same forest in the same early hours, another study of how light falls through old growth: Forest Light at Prairie Creek — the canopy at its most luminous.

For the same compulsion in the Sierra Nevada — returning to the largest of all the trees: the Generals Highway through Sequoia National Park — the Sierra Nevada version of going back.

Further south in the same California redwood range, another waterfall in an old-growth canyon: Tiptoe Falls at Portola Redwoods — a Santa Cruz Mountains waterfall in an old-growth canyon.

Fine Art Prairie Creek Redwoods Photography Print

Morning light through the Prairie Creek Redwoods, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, Northern California.

Slivers of light stream through the Prairie Creek Redwoods.
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Novaculata: Back to the Redwoods

In the old-growth interior of Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, early morning light enters the forest in pieces — narrow, directional, blade-edged. The gaps in the canopy are precise; the light that comes through them is more precise still. Novaculata: the Latin word for razor-sharp, and the name this image carries, because the light behaves like a blade — cutting through the redwood columns, illuminating the forest floor in strips, leaving the spaces between in a shadow that makes the lit sections glow. This is a morning quality of light specific to old growth, where the canopy is dense and continuous enough to hold the light in slant until the sun rises high enough to scatter it.

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