Photographic Portfolio

Prerequisites

• Take the Photography course
• Take the Image Editing course

Developing an online catalogue of plant information.

This course teaches you how to prepare material for later uploading into an online plant catalogue. You research details of an individual plant species, write two paragraphs about each species, take some photographs using a digital camera, edit those photographs in an image editor and submit them for checking. Once approved, the data will be entered into our searchable online plant catalogue - http://www.gardencad.net/plants.

For each species that you intend to load into our online database at http://gardencad.net/plants we want you to record a set of information similar to that shown in the figure below for Acacia iteaphylla.

Step 1: Use WordPad (Via Start>Accessories>WordPad) to create a text file containing as much information as you can about the species you are studying i.e botanical name, common name, height class, soil pH, rainfall needed to survive etc. In addition to the fields shown below, please add the plant family name - in the case of Acacia iteaphylla it belongs to the family Leguminosae. [Macintosh users can use any text editor, but not a full blown word processor]

Step 2: Using the information that you have collected, write a paragaph description of the plant similar to the example below.

Polygala myritfolia 'var grandiflora', a member of the Leguminosae is widely grown in the temperate parts of Australia. It is a small shrub, with dark green rounded leaves about 2 cm long. The flowers are produced in summer and in the grandiflora variety are quite large (4-5 cm long), white at the base and prominently purple on the long pea like part of the flower. The plant grows to about 1 meter tall, tolerates acid, neutral and calcareous soils and requires about 500 mm annual rainfall to survive without supplementary watering.

Then make a second paragraph which is a list of key words descibing the plant. Separate each key word with a space

Purple white flowers leguminosae 500mm rain acid neautral calcareous 1 meter tall summer water wise

Both these paragraphs will be used later when your data is entered into the online catalogue. When you have finished preparing the WordPad text file, save the file in a location where you know that you will be able to retrieve it later. Later, you will simply copy your description from the Wordpad file into an online text box to upload the information for us to check. You will use the infomation again when uploading to the catalogue so make sure that you save it. You do not want to have to type the information more than once!

Step 3: Upload your description.

Step 4: Take at least two photographs of each plant that you have chosen for your digital herbarium (in a landscape setting); one a habit photograph and the other a close up of the flower.

Use an image editing program (IrfanView) to resize each image to 800 pixels wide. Make sure that you put text into the image (the Generic and species name) and also name the image file (Use SaveAs) and also make it the same as the botanical name of the species e.g. Acacia iteaphylla habit.jpg, Acacia iteaphylla closeup.jpg.

Please do not make a submision until you have both these images. Photos of a species without the flower will only be accepted if the species does not flower in cultivation.