Micro-Sublime

Hope, excitement, even affection…these can be drummed up. Not so with awe. Awe must be handed to you.

Thank you, Theo Bosboom.

Flag iris from Flowerscapes
Photo: Theo Bosboom

We stumbled on images of his Flowerscapes in PetaPixel, a spot where VERY serious photographers share trade secrets. Bosboom’s expertise with lighting, lenses, shutter speeds and the like went clear over our heads. So too did his photographs of foxglove blossoms — big as medieval church bells– and flag iris petals suspended in canopies of yellow.

Bosboom has traveled the world as a nature photographer. He’s no stranger to grandeur. In fact we believe it’s his affinity for grandeur that enabled him to take this startlingly new perspective on plants.

Common Tansy
from Flowerscapes
Photo: Theo Bosboom

Stems of bluebells soar upward like sycamores. Common tansy looks anything but. Instead of standing in a strip of roadside weeds, looking down, we’re in a grove looking skyward at pods big coconuts.

Disarmingly, Bosbooms calls his Flowerscapes a “bug’s eye view”, a vision from the ground up. But they don’t strike us that way. Instead, they offer voyages down and deep, where we can see for the first time the true vitality of what is small, quiet and everyday.

Bosboom has been awarded for his magnificent work in Iceland and Africa,  yet for this project he turned back home to the Netherlands and his bike.

“I often photographed in roadside verges and other small strips or patches of flowers in cities and villages. Nature photographers still often tend to view this kind of urban nature as inferior to the ‘real’ nature found in national parks and nature reserves. But in reality, all those scattered little patches may be just as important for biodiversity as those nature reserves. And from a ground-level perspective, I found it makes little difference.”

“From the photos, you can rarely tell whether they were taken in a city, a roadside verge, or in the heart of a nature reserve — it’s all wilderness on a micro scale.”

Bluebells from Flowerscapes
Photo: Theo Bosboom

What makes a wilderness anyway? A sense of intrusion on a place we didn’t, couldn’t, mastermind. A place that requires us to look out and be silenced. A place where anything might happen (though Theo Bosboom labored long and conscientiously to compose these images). A wilderness invites us to be honest and small.

Find Theo’s Flowerscapes here.