This piece is written by Harry AKA PlantBoi, Instigator at PLANT GANG.

In our second week the insane diversity of flora and fauna continued with recent viewings including a caiman, snapping turtle, two-toed sloth, white faced monkey, tree boa, one-day blooming Sobralia decora orchid and an array of colourful heliconia.

Each day of modelling adds a new challenge to explore. From the diverse sizes of flora bringing challenges of depth of field, to colouration and reflections requiring cross-polarisation techniques and careful colour balancing.

In this way, the immense diversity of this region's flora, the reason for visiting this site, adds an extra level of difficulty to the process. Yet that is the joy of this pilot, discovering solutions that allow us to develop a more automated system of 3D capture that can be more easily rolled out to decentralise the modelling process.

Problem-solving has been a rewarding and incredibly informative process so far, allowing us to begin to develop protocols for this process. We’re also playing with methods of specimen, currently utilising 3 methods.

For certain specimens such as a climbing monstera we've been deploying in-field scanning, which is an extremely exciting method, as you capture both the specimen and its environment. Alongside this for other plants I’ve been carefully removing these specimens and potting them for modelling in the studio. This allows for more controlled scanning, whilst being able to return the specimen post-scan. Finally, we are also taking some cuttings of certain parts of plants, such as heliconias. Crucially, this method will eventually allow us to produce models with associated cuttings to be stored as 2D pressings following traditional herbarium methodology. Thereby anchoring our models to reality through physical scientifically tractable counterparts.

Until next time… LFG (Lets Fucking Grow!)