Covidity

Like most people, I spent much of last year in or near home. Travel choices and obligations evaporated. I had been laboring on a wildflower project for the past 5 years, so I decided to spend my time finishing the photography. Hiking backwood trails looked to me as an easy approach to social distancing.

The good news is that the 15 months dedicated to the project allowed me to finish the gallery. There are now over 2500 wildflower portraits in the gallery, with a few more still to be added.

The panorama below is an example of where this project is heading. This is a panorama of Central Texas wildflowers arranged as the visible spectrum. The concept is to show how wildflowers use all of the colors in the spectrum including others, in ultraviolet, that can be seen by insects but not us.

This panorama will be 3' by 30', with an interpretive panel at one end that includes a legend of the flowers. I have printed a few at a smaller size (1' X 9'), and the result is as I hoped. We will fabricate the panorama in sections, then mount them side by side to show the entire wildflower rainbow.

I have also arranged the images as a square, reducing the space required for a mounting.

For the past 50 years, I have worked to illustrate biodiversity not as a theory in a textbook but as it exists in the real world around us. This is simply another one of my projects that shares that goal.

The following are links to the galleries with the individual images as well as a collection of collages. Many of these collections are still works in progress, but this gives you a sense of where I am heading.