You never know who might commission photography, but if I was guessing or trying to forecast who would be in touch, Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh would be a fairly wild guess.
But for an upcoming project for the forthcoming re-opening of the Palm Houses this Autumn, they needed exceptional photography of a scientist and his work.
Fortunately, the Bio Mechanical scientist was based at the School of Engineering at University of Birmingham in Edgbaston. He works as an assistant professor, working in the highly advanced field of the mechanics of slender structures and shape-morphing structures in the plant world.
I spent a couple of hours at the science facility in various labs and offices to get a number of interesting and informative portraits of Mingchao Liu.
It is always my intention to try and tell the story in just one frame. The photograph with the scientist, his bio engineering model and the green foliage screenshot, comes closest to achieving this. The model mimics how plants and leaves change shape when wet.
It’s a small model which acts in exactly that way, providing a strong and rigid outer shell which can snap back to a fairly flat original form.
I took the opportunity to do more creative headshots in the lab environment and even out on the stairwell, to give a full-length shot to differ from the close-ups with the experimental model.
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