Nita Winter and Rob Badger take you behind the scenes of their 27-year journey photographing wildflowers throughout California. It be
gan 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 book, co-published with CNPS, focuses on California’s amazing plant diversity and is a companion to their traveling exhibit. Gorgeous superbloom scenery is not 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.
Internationally acclaimed conservation photographers Nita Winter and Rob Badger have been life partners and creative collaborators for more than three decades. Their work has been featured in Time, Mother Jones, Sierra, Flora magazine, the New York Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times.