They are the winners of the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for Conversation Photography 2020 and their show “California Blooming” is on exhibit NOW at the San Diego Natural History Museum. For our May 2021 online meeting, it is our extraordinary pleasure to have Nita Winter and Rob Badger as our guests, with a unique look behind the scenes and the photography of their wonderful book “Beauty and the Beast — California Wildflowers and Climate Change”. Please continue reading if you’re interested.
Meeting date and time are at the end of this invitation.
To join the online meeting, you must be a member of the Photo Section. Membership is only $25 and can be purchased online. The Zoom link to join the meeting will be sent to members a few days ahead of the meeting, via our mailing list.
A 27 Year Wildflower Journey: The Making of “Beauty and the Beast — California Wildflowers and Climate Change”
Rob Badger and Nita Winter take you behind the scenes on their 27-year journey photographing wildflowers throughout California and the West. It began in 1992 when they discovered and fell in love with California’s spectacular wildflower blooms in the Mojave Desert’s Antelope Valley California Poppy Preserve. Photographing these beautiful landscapes and individual flowers evolved into their documentary art project, Beauty and the Beast: Wildflowers and Climate Change. Their new beautiful multiple award winning coffee table book, co-published with CNPS, focuses on California’s amazing plant diversity and is a companion to their traveling exhibit.
Gorgeous scenery isn’t the only thing that makes the Beauty and the Beast wildflower photos so special. Rob and Nita developed unique field techniques to capture one-of-a-kind images. They create every one of the photographs in the field, lugging 80 pounds of cameras and their “natural light” studio equipment from below sea level in Death Valley National Park to 13,000-foot-high mountain passes.
Their new book’s collection includes Rob’s floral portrait techniques that go beyond any traditional approach. In the “Contact” series, the luminous flower petals actually touch the lens; in the “Wrapped” series, flowers are enfolded in black or white fabric to complement their geometric forms.
Books are available with both shipping or safe pick up options in southern Marin through www.wildflowerbooks.com
About Nita & Rob
Internationally acclaimed conservation photographers Rob Badger and Nita Winter have been life partners and creative collaborators for more than three decades.
Rob’s environmental images have won multiple awards, including Best in Photojournalism in international competition. He was one of three American photographers chosen to document Russian nature preserves in Siberia. In 1998, he presented a slideshow documenting the impact of mining on our public lands at the National Press Club in Washington DC for the Sierra Club, to support the Clinton administration’s efforts to reform the antiquated 1872 Mining Law.
Nita began her photographic career documenting her work fighting wildfires in northern California and later as a National Park Ranger on Alcatraz. In 1986, Nita had her first major exhibit, “The Children of the Tenderloin.” This documentary project launched her career and directed her focus toward creating healthy communities. The series received extensive media coverage and showed her first-hand the power of photographic storytelling. Over the next 17 years, she produced and created portraits for six major public art projects celebrating the Bay Area’s diverse communities.
Their work has been featured in NBC-TV, KQED-TV, Time, Mother Jones, and Sierra magazines, the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times. They are the recent recipients of the Sierra Club’s 2020 Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography.
You can find and follow them online on Instagram @beautybeastwild and @winterbadgercollection; on Twitter @beautybeastwild and @nitawinter; on Facebook @beautybeastwildflowers, @nitawinter and @robbadger; and on LinkedIn @winterbadger-collection.
Gallery
Here are example photos from the presentation. You can find a lot more on their website at WinterBadger.com.
MemberShare
After the main presentation, we’ll take a short break before we continue with our MemberShare. Here’s a quick reminder of the guidelines and procedure:
- Send up to five photos via Dropbox file request.
- Please send only JPEG files, sRGB color space
- Minimum resolution: 1920 pixels wide or 1080 pixels high (whichever comes first)
- Prepare to speak no more than 10-20 seconds on each photo
- We’re a photo club – please share only your original photographs with us (no CGI, digital art, etc.)
- Deadline for MemberShare submissions: Friday, May 14 16th, 6pm
- Nameplates: feel free to include a portrait format headshot with your photos
To submit your images, simply click this button:
If you need help or if there’s anything unclear about this procedure, the Dropbox help article on file requests contains everything you need to know.
NOTE: Your photos are only shown during MemberShare and will be deleted afterwards. We do not keep copies. There is no need to watermark your photos. If you feel that you must add a logo or other overlay, please keep it small and unobtrusive.
Also, please do not wait until the very last minute to submit the photos you want to share. We need time to prepare the image presentation. When the MemberShare is especially popular, we may have to reduce the amount of images from each member. If that happens we will announce it before MemberShare begins, and hope for your understanding.
Meeting Date & Time
To attend the meeting, you must be a member of the Photo Section. Our memberships run for the duration of the calendar year, so it is still a great time to join us. Membership is only $25 and available online. Take a look at our membership page to learn more.
- Zoom Online Video Meeting (for members only)
- More information about our online meetings is here: Online Meetings
- If you never used Zoom before, you can download the client software here.
- Members will receive a link to join the meeting via email
- Date: Saturday, May 15, 2021
- 1.45 PM opening of meeting (please join early if you never used Zoom before!)
- 2 PM start of meeting and main presentation
See you at the meeting!