2004 (New York: Sterling)
A quest to photograph North America’s largest, oldest, and strongest trees, plus a glorious obsession with old growth forests, occupied nearly six years of Balog's life and resulted in this large-format volume. At first, he built enormous portrait studios in the forest. Then, beginning in 2000, he invented a method to photograph the very biggest, coast redwoods and giant sequoia, in segments from top to bottom and then composite these elements into portraits that showed the entire tree for the first time. Some images are a celebration of arboreal life, others a reminder of how human impact has altered or eliminated primeval forests. Throughout, the images remind us of the rich abundance of what makes nature natural and preserve it against human impact.