In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck wrote: "The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree." Well, maybe we were just waiting for affordably priced photography equipment and aerial drones to come along.

Eric Cheng, the videographer who brought us this gulls-eye view of surfers in Santa Cruz, now brings us this mesmerizing shot from the floor of a Northern California Redwood forest, up through the canopy of the tallest trees in the world:

More from Steinbeck: "The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time."