The American Botanical Council (ABC) presents a photo workshop with acclaimed botanical photographer and herbalist Steven Foster, at Finca Luna Nueva Lodge in Costa Rica from May 12-18, 2010. Spend six nights at the beautiful facilities at Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, an ecolodge and Certified Biodynamic herb farm in the heart of the Costa Rican rainforest, located, just ten miles from one of the world’s most active volcanoes, the Arenal Volcano.
Plants provide more than simple visual aesthetics. Photography offers an excellent medium to begin to explore simple beauty and gaining a deeper understanding of how to relate to plants. We will focus on techniques for improving your plant photography. Rather than dry optical theory or studio techniques, we will spend most of our time on techniques for field work.
ANYONE CAN TAKE GREAT PHOTOGRAPHS! JOIN US NO MATTER WHAT YOUR SKILL LEVEL. IT’S NOT THE CAMERA THAT COUNTS. WORKSHOP REQUIREMENTS: ENTHUSIASM TO LEARN AND ENJOY A FABULOUS TROPICAL VENUE.
The workshop fee includes six nights (meals inclusive) at Finca Luna Nueva Lodge, airport transfers from San Jose International Airport (SJO), and the workshop itself. Priced at only $1,250 (double occupancy) to allow anyone who has dreamed of taking a photography workshop in a lush tropical location to fulfill that dream. The price does not include roundtrip airfare from your originating airport. Single rooms are $200.00 additional. Participants will also be required to purchase their own travel/medical insurance. Sign-up deadline is April 15, 2010.
We have new photo galleries of “goji” — the fruits of Lycium chinense (shot in the Oriental Herb Garden at the American Botanical Council, created in association with the Academy of Oriental Medicine in Austin) and Lycium barbarum. Go into any health or natural food store these days and you will find goji berries in just about everything—goji juice, goji-laced chocolate bars, whole dried goji berries ready to replace your raisins. Better known in pre-marketing hype days, as Lycium, Chinese wolfberry, Chinese boxthorn, or Chinese matrimony vine, the dried fruits proliferating in the market are either from Lycium chinense or Lycium barbarum. L. chinense has wide distribution in East Asia, whereas L. barbarum is found primarily in the central Chinese Province of Ningxia. Both species are widely naturalized outside of China. Lycium chinense is found in at least fifteen states east of the Mississippi and five states west of the Mississippi. It grows as a weed at the edge of my yard, and perhaps yours as well. Lycium barbarum is found in almost the entire continental U.S. (except Nevada) and half of Canada. The dried fruits are a common food item throughout eastern Asia and the Middle East, where barrels of the inexpensive dried fruits are a staple in every market. When one sees the price and availability in foreign lands, it’s easy to shudder at the price charged for the bright red Asian equivalent of raisins in the American market. The name “goji” was never used for the plant or its fruit until it was popularized in the American market in the past decade. “Goji” is a phonetic twist on the Chinese name for the fruits “Guo qi zi“. The fruits were not commonly called “berries” either. In the American Herbal Products Association’s book Herbs of Commerce (2000), a list of more than 1,600 herbs found in the American market with their scientific names, common name synonyms, and “standard common name,” Lycium barbarum and Lycium chinense are both listed under the standard common name “Lycium”.
To a botanical photographer and herbalist like me, there’s nothing quite as exciting as seeing a plant that you’ve always known yet never seen in bloom for the first time. Such was the case when I was at the American Botanical Council’s annual on-site board of trustees meeting at the Case Mill Homestead in Austin on November 7th, when ABC Education Coordinator, Holly Ferguson, pointed a blooming SAFFRON plant out to me. The delicate stigmas of saffron (Crocus sativus) are, of course, the saffron of commerce. What a beautiful plant! We have additional photo galleries of Crocus species including Spring Crocus (Crocus vernus var. neapolitanus) growing wild on Mt. Komovi in the mountains of Montenegro (part of the former Yugoslavia), as well as cultivated Dutch Crocus (Crocus vernus).
Hollyhock Alcea rosea like many members of the mallow family is a useful medicinal plant due to its high content of mucilagin. Mostly associated with flower gardens, it’s a great addition to the herb garden, adding color and beauty, as well as being a suitable substitute for marshmallow Althaea officinalis. Many gardeners assume that hollyhock originates from Europe, however it is a relatively recent European garden introduction, first grown there in the sixteenth century. It actually originates from South China. Here’s our recent post of Hollyhock photographs. Those images with water in the background were naturalized plants growing on the edge of Kotor Bay in Montenegro in the eastern Adriatic.
My artistic goal as a photographer specializing in medicinal and aromatic plants, is to capture the spirit and botanical beauty-in-form using natural ambient light. As a medicinal plant specialist and photographer, my work takes me around the world. Photo equipment is ever present. In my botanical photography, color, form and design offer themselves to the observant eye at the right time of day, in shade, in rain, or with clouds hiding harsh sunlight.
These are the situations I strive to work in, which give me the best color saturation, the richest light, and the greatest challenge in exposure length, depth-of-field, and waiting for that still moment when a breath of air does not move the subject and offers up the detail values that I seek. I formerly worked with 35 mm color positive film and now have shifted to a digital workflow.
I strive to know the plants that I photograph: their names, botany, history, and human connection (use). I feel this helps to give me a special relationship to the plant as it reveals its beauty.
Our main business is licensing stock photos from our collections of over 150,000 images of medicinal and aromatic plants, herbs, wildflowers and other botanicals from every continent except Antarctica. All images are “rights protected” rather than “royalty free.” Licensing of stock photos is usually on a one-time, non-exclusive basis per image. Licensing fees depend upon the type of use, such as web, print, editorial or commerical; size of use and/or frequency of use. Other factors may also apply. Licensing fees may be as little as $50.00 for a minor use or up to $10,000 for major ad placement. New images go up at our galleries almost daily. Click on “Photography” at our home page, and go to the links under “Scientific Names” of plants to view images. Remember to clean your browser cache when you come back for a return visit. Enjoy! And if we can help you, we would be happy to preview images.
Rehmannia, di-huang, Rehmannia glutinosa (Scrophulariaceae, sometimes placed in the Gesneriaceae, and now with new genetic information, placed in the Plantaginaceae-who would have guessed based on morphological features!) is a widely used drug in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). There are as many varieties of Rehmannia in China as apples in the United States. The brick-red tuberous roots are used in prescriptions related to concepts of blood in TCM paradigms, nourishing yin, cooling the blood, stops bleeding, nourishes the blood, etc. This relative small plant, growing to about 18 inches in height has beautiful, glandular-hairy, reddish, tubular flowers that superficially resemble those of foxglove (Digitalis). There’s lots more on Rehmannia in my book Herbal Emissaries-Bringing Chinese Herbs to the West (with Yue Chongxi).
If you’re not looking for them, you probably won’t see them. The tiny flowers of Maryland figwort Scrophularia marilandica, a member of the figwort family (Scrophulariaceae), range from reddish to almost brown in color. The flowers look like a miniature upside down scoop. The leaves and the root have been used medicinally. A tea of the leaves is traditionally used as a folk remedy for restlessness, anxiety and a mild sleep aid. Native groups used the root for fevers, hemorrhoids, and as a diuretic.
One of the most beautiful fall wildflowers, cardinal flower Lobelia cardinalis, has striking scarlet blooms. It’s a difficult plant to photograph because the vibrant flowers have a somewhat reflective texture making it easy to get an over-exposure blowing out details. Therefore, if using a reflective metering system, the photographer must adjust the exposure with an 18 percent gray background. The root and leaves were used by indigenous groups for various purposes. The root infusion was used for stomachache, syphilis, typhoid and worms. Leaf tea was utilized for colds, crop, nosebleed, fever and other uses. Historically, it was mentioned as a possible substitute for Lobelia or Indian-tobacco (Lobelia inflata), but considered weaker. Cardinal flower is an obscure medicinal plant seldom if ever used and best appreciated as a wildflower. See Foster and Duke 2nd edition (2002) for more information on medicinal use of various Lobelias.