About me: My name is Jonas Andréas­son and I am a flower pho­tog­ra­pher from Swe­den. I was born 31 years ago not very far from Råshult, the birth­place of Carl Lin­naeus, who gave all flow­ers their Latin names and laid the foun­da­tion for the botan­i­cal sci­ences. Pho­tog­ra­phy and nature have been pas­sions for much of my life. I have lived, trav­eled, and pho­tographed regions of the United States, China, Europe and the Mid­dle East before finally return­ing to the nature I grew up in as a child. 

Eco-friendly: I have cho­sen to only pho­to­graph nature close to where I live. In this way, I do not have to travel around the world to find beauty, but can reach it through a sim­ple bike ride or a walk. This is what I call “eco-friendly photography”. 

Pho­tog­ra­phy: My two main tools are sun­light and patience. Often, it will require close to 1000 images of only one flower until it ulti­mately feels right. I am will­ing to do this because I want to take flower pho­tog­ra­phy to another level. As Lin­naeus him­self said, “The first step in wis­dom is to know the things them­selves.” It is not enough that the image is beau­ti­ful — it must be excep­tion­ally beau­ti­ful and it must con­vey a clear mes­sage that leads to reflec­tion and dia­logue about its mean­ing. To cap­ture every flower’s nat­ural beauty I only shoot out­doors with­out arti­fi­cial flashes or stu­dio light­ing. Although many other flower pho­tog­ra­phers use images that are a result of manip­u­la­tion by a com­puter pro­gram such as Pho­to­shop, I know that it is the sun’s rays which truly cre­ate these amaz­ing effects. Every­thing is nat­u­rally beau­ti­ful. 

Envi­ron­ment: The world that we live in is very brit­tle and vul­ner­a­ble to human impact. Even if my efforts have no great influ­ence, I nev­er­the­less think it is impor­tant for all busi­nesses, large and small, to try intro­duce a cer­tain degree of envi­ron­men­tal aware­ness into their vision. This means, among other things, that Nordicflower.com lives on a green web host­ing server that is CO2 neu­tral, that I don’t travel very far when work­ing, and that the paper used for print­ing is one of the most envi­ron­men­tally friendly papers cur­rently available.