Humboldt Photographer Wins EcoWatch’s Photo Contest with “The Mighty Redwoods”

For EcoWatch’s Earth Day Photo Contest, a Humboldt photographer submitted his photo The Mighty Redwoods (above), which shows a hiker entering the beautiful North Coast redwoods. The beautiful photo scored him the top prize.

David Ruddock of McKinleyville won the accolades from EcoWatch along with a $250 Patagonia gift card for his photo submission, a highlight of the old growth redwoods on the Northern California coast.

Ruddock is a retired photographer and graphic designer who lives with his wife Susie in Mckinleyville, California. Their town is centrally located to several Old Growth coastal Redwood groves, and the couple take advantage of that fact at least once a month.

“We stood beside our first Redwood on a camping trip about fifteen years ago and decided then and there that when we retired, we would do so in an area where we could walk among them often,” Ruddock wrote in an email to EcoWatch. “John Steinbeck once wrote, ‘The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always.'”

“There are of course many photos that were close but that one seemed to evoke an emotion in the photograph about the awareness of a unique species,” said contest judge Diane Boswell. “We noticed that in the Redwoods photo the rays of light on the subject created dimension and the small figure of the hiker gave it a feeling of scale.”