As winter releases its grip on the eastern Mediterranean, the island of Rhodes springs into colourful life as countless thousands of wildflowers burst into flower. There’s no better time of year in which to explore this compact, friendly island, camera in hand, as photographic opportunities abound at every turn. This really is the zenith of the flowering season, and the budding photographer is spoiled for choice!
We’re delighted to offer this exclusive tour to explore the wildflower photography opportunities of Rhodes in springtime accompanied by professional garden and plant photographer Sarah Cuttle. Sarah’s career has been devoted to plant photography, and has taken her around the world. Closer to home, she is a regular photographer for BBC Gardener’s World, and the Royal Horticultural Society. Her images regularly feature in a wide variety of world class publications – you’ll find her photography gracing RHS The Garden, The English Garden, Gardens Illustrated, House & Garden, and Country Living to name but a few familiar titles.
Sarah’s love of plant photography is infectious which, combined with her good humour and love of Rhodes, means our guests are in for a fabulous week in her company.
With a week at our disposal, we’ve ample time to explore the island’s varied habitats, enjoying days in montane and lowland locations, in lush flower meadows, dry garrigue, and cool olive groves, both inland and near the clear blue waters of the Mediterranean. While Rhodes is justly renowned for the wide variety of orchids it boasts at this time of year, there’s plenty more flowering variety to explore – we’ll spend time with delicate cyclamens and fritillaries, statuesque and enormous dragon arums, drifts of campanulas, clusters of hyacinths, and deliciously scented endemic peonies. Beneath the fluttering pastel flowers of Cistus rock roses we’ll find the strange, waxy blooms of parasitic Cytinus ‘vampirecups’, a plant that lives within the very tissue of another plant, emerging only to flower.
Rhodes is jam-packed with plants with stories attached as colourful as their flowers themselves. This is the territory of Sarah’s co-leader for this tour, seasoned plant-hunter and author of botanical bestseller Orchid Summer, Jon Dunn. Jon loves sharing botanical stories almost as much as he loves wildflower photography and, together with Sarah, has been returning to Rhodes for some years now. Your leaders for this photography tour love the island, have become firm friends with the family who run the delightful, small rural hotel we base ourselves in, and can’t wait to share it all with you.
Whether you take your images with a phone or a state of the art camera, Sarah will help you to capture memorable images, hone your photographic technique, and to experiment with fresh approaches to plant photography. For some, this holiday will be a gentle-paced introduction to wildflower photography, while for others it may build upon an existing enthusiasm for this aspect of photography and/or wildlife-watching. We hope that for everyone involved it will provide guests with techniques and good practice that will stand them in good stead wherever their travels take them or, indeed, in their garden or local countryside nearer to home!
Techniques to be covered include the basics of plant photography and composition; working with natural light, and tools to help optimise it; and working with off-camera supplementary lighting. In the evenings, before the delicious dinners our hotel serves, Sarah will be on hand to provide informal and friendly advice as we review the day’s images over a drink or two. At the end of the week, we’ll enjoy a slideshow of our guests’ favourite images after our final supper together as we look back on what will, undoubtedly, be a most enjoyable week exploring the photographic opportunities of one of Europe’s finest spring wildflower displays.
