Abstract:

The use of herbarium collections by teachers/doctors/herbalists dates back to the beginning of the 16th century and later, to the first voyages of scientific exploration, becoming an essential tool for all collectors and botanists. This work consists of the presentation of an alternative way of observing nature, for educational purposes, through images obtained by a cameraless photographic process that goes back to the beginnings of photography. With the images obtained, we are organizing an alternative herbarium representative of the forest species that make up the botanical garden of the University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro (UTAD) in Portugal.

The quality of the photographs depends on the printing material, the samples (sheets) collected, the light and the atmospheric conditions. The resulting images do not provide much descriptive detail of the leaves making it difficult to identify them in their natural habitat.

However, the images obtained are unique from an artistic point of view and can be used in practical works of physical and biological sciences, promoting interdisciplinarity between different areas of knowledge. With the images obtained from the foliage of the UTAD botanical garden, a herbarium will be created with the cataloging of organic species. The procedure for obtaining cameraless photographs called lumen print can be found, for example, in [1, 2].

This work shows how herbaria can be used as interdisciplinary tools between botany, physical sciences and art, promoting global learning.

References:
[1] https://www.photoed.ca/post/lovely-lumens
[2] https://www.lomography.com/magazine/321837-how-to-make-lumen-prints

Keywords:

Alternative photography, Optics, Interdisciplinarity, Lumen print, Botany.