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Theo Bosboom
Theo Bosboom is a passionate photographer from the Netherlands, specialising in nature and landscapes. In 2013, he turned his back on a successful legal career to pursue his dream of being a fulltime professional photographer. He is regarded as a creative photographer with a strong eye for detail and composition and always trying to find fresh perspectives.
Foxglove (digitalis), photographed along the road near Garderen, the Netherlands. Thanks to the spots on the inside of the flower, bumblebees and bees are lured into the flowers to snack on the nectar.
A couple of months ago, my new photo book, Flowerscapes. A Bug’s Eye View was published. A book that - as the title reveals - is entirely dedicated to our wildflowers, photographed from ground level. It is clearly different from my previous photo books in several ways, but nonetheless, I believe it fits very well within my style and my vision of photography.
I had been wondering before what an ant sees when it looks up while walking through a field of flowers? Or a ladybug that has just landed on a flower stalk? And I had been thinking how wonderful it would be to photograph wildflowers from such a bug's eye view! But until recently, this remained only a dream. Cameras and lenses — especially professional ones — were simply too large and bulky, and the minimum focusing distance was often at least several dozen centimetres. But when a long, narrow wide-angle macro lens (the Laowa Periprobe) that can be rotated 360 degrees appeared on the market, I suddenly saw a chance to make the dream a reality. The first results were promising, so I decided to put my other photography projects on hold for a while and devote myself entirely to capturing flowerscapes: flowers in their natural habitat, seen from ground level.
It marked the beginning of a personal journey of discovery through countless flower fields and other places where flowers grow, such as roadside verges, forests, dunes, and parks — mostly in my home country, the Netherlands and sometimes just across the border in Germany or Belgium. This also matched my desire as a photographer to work more locally and to reduce my environmental impact. Most destinations were within an hour’s reach, and in some cases, I could even get there on foot or by bike.