Photograph Primer

In 1995 the Western Australian Herbarium began a volunteer-coordinated effort to construct a collection of photographs of every known Western Australian plant in their natural habitat. With the help of the community, this goal is steadily approaching.

The photographs presented in FloraBase are composites made from slides and prints donated to the Herbarium by over 180 amateur and professional photographers. The names of each photographer whose photo was used in a composite always appears in text underneath the photos in the composite.

The project differs from other image catalogues in one particular area: the name of the subject of every photograph—the plant’s name—is checked for accuracy. We can do this because we have access to expert plant systematists both at the Herbarium and worldwide. Furthermore, this happens automatically if a specimen of the subject was taken after it was photographed. We call this specimen a voucher. Over 6,840composites consisting of one or more photographs are now available for viewing in FloraBase.

Our policy on access to FloraBase photos and our Image Collection is available under our Copyright Statement.

How do we do it?

A team of about 15 volunteers scan the donated photographs and assign a name to the subject of the photo. This name may be slightly different from the one suggested by the photographer, or it may be changed later based on other information that tells us the name we were using no longer applies to a Western Australian plant.

Our volunteers then prepare a composite photograph illustrating the plant’s floral features, habit and habitat ready for use in FloraBase. They check the finished composite for:

representativeness — the colour, shape and size of the subject shows the species in its most common form. This is especially relevant when there are many minor variants to a species.
quality — the photographs that make up the composite are all of a sufficiently high photographic quality. Some of our older composites need to be replaced, as we have raised our standards over the years as we have access to so many photos.
textual correctness — the plant name and the names of each photographer in the caption are spelled correctly.

There are over 36,083 photographs in the collection.

Members of the team, both current and “retired” are: Jack Abbott (deceased), Pauline Baker, Harold Bennett (deceased), Scott Coad, Lynette Davies, Peter Davies, Maureen Edwards, Ray Edwards, Ella Fagence, Joan Start, Janet Harding, Jennifer Hawkes, Alison Hearn, Jean Hooper (deceased), Anne Ireland, Bill Johnson, Suzie Lintern, Kim Macey, Kath Napier, Ken Richardson, Adele Rogers, Leah Segal and John Smith.

An example composite image created by the Image Team. The subject is Banksia attenuata and it is being used to illustrate the Proteaceae family.

Vouchering

As I alluded to in the introduction, we can simplify the task of validating the name of the subject of the photograph if a specimen is lodged in the Herbarium. This voucher receives a plant name and attention from scientists, and the name that the voucher receives is the one we use to label photographs in the Image Collection. If the name is changed later for some reason—perhaps an expert has cleaned up a misunderstood section of the tree of life—we change the name of the photos in the collection.