| > The article mentions that illustration is a lot better than photography Photography is just not enough. Botanical illustration puts all required details, and only those, together in the same place. 1-Can show all the plants in the same family in the same figure. 2-Can link features that never appear at the same time (like winter buds, fall fruits, summer flowers and associated fauna and funghia), 3-Can play with the scale showing features of much different sizes at similar scale (i.e tricolpate pollen, the shape of the aperture in anthers, and silhouette of the whole tree). 4-Will show the required details, but not more. A photo will show five plants mixed in the same picture so is often very confuse for an untrained eye to understand "what" is from "who". Photos lead often to "frankenplants" and it takes a lot of experience to disclose it, and this is a problem [1]. 5-Will be uniform in design. Not distracting light or cropped leaves in photos. Not backgrounds that vary among figures. 6-Will take care of correct hues and color variations. Cheap caperas distroy red hues for example. Subtle variations are notoriously difficult to reproduce. Colors will be oversaturated and will change a lot when taken in different hours of the day. Similar species will appear darker and its mimic will appear lighter. In the end you have a very confuse picture. [1] This can seem just pedantry until you realize that your children are looking at a photo showing the fruits of an edible species, tagged as "delicious as raw berries and green parts can be used in salads" but mixed with leaves of a second species growing in the background that is poisonous (and there is not a single warn about it at sight). Internet is full of those mistakes. |