Leviathans — Giant Sequoias, Yosemite

Greg titled these sequoias "Leviathans" — the biblical sea monster, the thing beyond ordinary scale — and the name is accurate in a way that "giant" is not, because "giant" still implies a category of things that exist at human scale, only larger. The oldest trees in this grove predate recorded European history; they were already old when Rome fell. Made on medium format, this composition refuses the temptation to prettify — these are organisms of such scale that the image's primary task is simply to document the fact of them without diminishing it. The "Recovered" tag in the filename indicates a file-recovery step in post-processing; the final image is clean and contains no artifacts from the recovery.