Multiple Cameras Combine to Photograph Entire Redwood Tree

How do you take a close-up photograph of an object as tall as a 35-story skyscraper? Slowly, surely, and with a really fancy camera.

According to the National Park Service, California’s redwood trees can grow up to 350 feet tall and 22 feet wide at their base. Many are hundreds, even thousands, of years old and rank as some of the largest, oldest living organisms on the planet. Anyone who has stood in the presence of these ancient giants knows how truly magnificent they are.

One such admirer is Michael Nichols. As a photographer for National Geographic, Nichols has traveled to exotic locales and done photo shoots in the deepest jungles. But recently, Nichols attempted to do something completely unique. He and a team of researchers and technicians photographed a giant redwood. Whole. In effect, they created “a seamless image of an entire redwood tree, from top to bottom.”

To tackle the job, Nichols’ team designed an amazing multi-camera rig capable of capturing the tree in sections. As you can see in the picture above, three cameras were tied together (one focused on the right, one on the center and one on the left), with gyroscopes attached to keep them steady. The rig was then lowered from the top of the tree to the bottom, capturing a total of 84 pictures which they later assembled into one amazing shot.

The finalized shot effectively captures something of the ancient redwood’s grandeur, a feeling Nichols wants to convey to those who may not know about the trees.

“I’ve worked in tropical forests my whole life,” he said, “and I’ve never made good pictures of trees. They’re hard to photograph. To capture a tree is a very complicated… that’s why we’re doing this picture which shows the whole thing, and hopefully people will feel the way they should feel about the tree when they look at the photograph.”

To see the picture in it’s entirety you can either grab the October edition of National Geographic or check out the magazine’s website. Along with dozens of other incredible pictures, facts and games, you can see the photograph at the end of a cool video that shows the photo process Michael Nichols went through to get it.