Gunn, who has lived in the Washington, D.C., area most of his life, had been seeking assignments that would both bring him closer to nature and communicate environmental change. “In so much of my previous work, I’ve been an outsider looking in on something, and this time I was really inside it,” he says. Gunn likes his images to be super sharp, so he observed how light was falling through the canopy; controlling the exposure gave depth to his photographs. Although the subject was dead trees, “there was still so much life,” he says. “It was magical from an imagery perspective.”