Brendan Bailes

January 9, 2024

Inside the Museum, Photographing Bonsai

Our Best Bonsai Photos of 2023

Brendan Bailes

January 9, 2024

Inside the Museum, Photographing Bonsai

Thank you to all of our supporters in 2023! You are the reason that the National Bonsai Foundation continues to thrive in our mission to preserve the history, protect the legacy, and prepare the future of the art of bonsai in America.

Whether you donated to the National Bonsai Foundation last year, visited the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum in person, or simply shared in the admiration of bonsai – your contributions to and participation in this great art form are deeply appreciated.

Through the course of years, decades, and even centuries, successive caretakers cultivate and nurture these incredible living art works. During our own lifetimes, the great responsibility and immense honor to care for these timeless trees falls to us. There is more to be done if we want to sustain the resilient beauty and persistent hope of bonsai for generations to come.

That's why, with your help, we will continue to sustain the art of bonsai in numerous ways throughout 2024:

We are proud to sponsor the National Bonsai Apprenticeship, the nation's premiere training program for up-and-coming bonsai artists. The renowned program prepares a new generation of American bonsai experts to ensure the future of the art of bonsai. Apprentices benefit from immersive education with professional curators and caretakers, hands-on experience with America’s national bonsai and penjing collections, and daily opportunities to hone their horticultural and artistic talents.
We partner with the U.S. National Arboretum to help maintain the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum, the first and finest museum of its kind in the world. We support new exhibitions of bonsai, penjing, and viewing stones, helping to share the magic of these art forms with the public. We also provide ongoing education and development for the curators, which offers expanded opportunities to keep current with the latest approaches and techniques to the art form, and allows them to gain learning to stay at the top of their field.
We inform, educate, and inspire people at all levels about this breathtaking art form. Through initiatives like World Bonsai Day, exhibitions around the country, hands-on workshops, and national awards, we continue to share and delight in these awe-inspiring trees that give us so much joy, hope, and purpose.

We are so grateful that you have joined us to support these initiatives. Our dedicated community includes everyone from bonsai artists with decades of experience to new enthusiasts who have just discovered the awe of bonsai. Wherever you find yourself on your bonsai journey, we value you and we're glad you're here.

Thank you for helping to cultivate this incredible living art form. Together, we can ensure a vibrant and enduring future for the art of bonsai.

Warm regards and best wishes for the new year!

Visit the Museum to see these beautiful trees in person.

Our Best Bonsai Photos of 2023

All photos courtesy of NBF Board Member and professional photographer Stephen Voss.

Click on any photo to see a larger version. You can then scroll through the gallery by clicking on the left-right icons or using your arrow keys.

Brendan Bailes

November 7, 2023

Photographing Bonsai, Inside the Museum

Bonsai By Night in Black and White

Brendan Bailes

November 7, 2023

Photographing Bonsai, Inside the Museum

If you've visited the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum at the U.S. National Arboretum, or if you've browsed through the photos on our website, you know how photogenic the bonsai collections can be. There is a special majesty to the trees on display, and the more time you spend with them, the more each one expresses its own unique artistic vision.

At night, an essence of mystery descends on the stone paths and serene gardens of the Arboretum and the Museum. Since the grounds are open during daytime hours, visitors don’t usually have a chance to see bonsai under the moon. When its dark, and especially in black and white photographs, a glamorous mix of shadows and light emerges among the trees.

These black and white photos of bonsai by night are uniquely alluring. The nocturnal setting and the stark style converge to showcase beguiling details of texture and form.

Which is your favorite photo? Let us know your reactions in the comments.

Click on any of the photos to view fullscreen. You can use the arrow keys or click on the left or right of each image to scroll through the gallery in the lightbox slideshow.

Kendra Rubinfeld

April 3, 2020

Photographing Bonsai

Photographing Bonsai with Stephen Voss: Searching For Order in Bonsai

Kendra Rubinfeld

April 3, 2020

Photographing Bonsai

As a photographer who now makes a living snapping pictures of some of the world’s most influential figures, Stephen Voss didn’t always know that photography could be more than a hobby. Once a bonsai novice, he certainly didn’t think he would publish a photography book of bonsai.

Now that he’s an accomplished photographer, Voss wants to share his “tricks of the bonsai photography trade.” This entry is part of his regular guest blog series, “Photographing Bonsai with Stephen Voss"," published on NBF’s blog, covering everything from lighting, angles and mindset needed when photographing the trees. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook and Instagram to never miss one of his entries! Read his last entry here.

I’ve been researching the work of an early nature photographer named Eliot Porter for the photography newsletter I write. Porter was one of the first nature photographers to use color film and a contemporary of Ansel Adams, a renowned photographer and conservationist. But Porter’s work did not feature the bold colors and blazing sunsets of today’s nature photographers. Instead, he sought subtlety and interrelationships of color and form.

Later in his career, Porter read James Gleick’s “Chaos: Making a New Science,” recognizing in the text the scientific theory that had guided his career and visual thinking. He then published “Nature’s Chaos,” a collection of photographs from the natural world, which sought to reconcile his work and these scientific ideas. In the introduction, he explains this idea:

Although subjects such as mosses, lichens or leaves that have just fallen are not orderly at all, when viewed as detailed sections, they become orderly. This process suggests a tension between order and chaos. When I photograph, I see the arrangement that looks orderly, but when you consider the subjects as a whole or on a larger scale, they appear disorderly. Only in fragments of the whole is nature’s order apparent.

Where this gets interesting to me is with bonsai, which are, to varying degrees, sculpted by the human hand and meant to be seen as a wholly arranged object. A bonsai master guides the trees on a path to order, but it’s an ever-evolving relationship that may take unexpected turns. Much of my bonsai photography is a search for order, picking out the most aesthetically pleasing parts of a tree while trying to acknowledge and appreciate the basic chaos ever-present in the nature world.

So how does one find visual order when photographing bonsai? To demonstrate, I’ll use some photographs of this beautiful Japanese Beech that has been in training since 1945 and was donated to the Museum by Kiyoshi Kawamata.

My first image of the tree looks like this:

Here we see a beautiful forest-style planting with at least 16 individual trees (and a young Museum visitor in the background).

To find order, we’re going to use all of the tools of photography that are at our disposal. This includes available light, exposure, lens choice and depth of field.

Now Here’s a first attempt at bringing some order to this image. I decreased the exposure so the background would darken. This helps the grayish-white branches to stand out more.

I also recomposed the image. Notice how more of the individual branches are now isolated against the dark background? I’ve circled those gaps here in red. Our brains are designed to look for contrast, to delineate based on light and dark tones. By darkening the image and composing it to allow more of the branches to stand out, I’ve already introduced a bit of order and made a more visually interesting photo.

Let’s take it a step further. I’ve changed to a longer lens for this image (180mm macro) and lowered my tripod. In this image, the tree trunk that’s slightly off-center is the main focus:

As I continue perusing the tree, I see some younger branches that are growing off to the right side of the pot. Using low depth of field, I’m able to isolate them against the soil at the bottom of the pot.

Here’s my first image:

But I’m wondering if there would be a more visually impactful way to show the beautiful curve of this branch. By recomposing so that the branches are seen against the black platform the trees rest on, it stands out even more, as seen here:

I’m not sure which of these images I like more. But trying out ideas is important when you’re taking photographs, not making too many judgments in the moment, knowing that you’ll be able to review the images later and determine what was successful.

Thanks for following along. I hope you all are staying safe and healthy. While the Museum may be closed, you can use the ideas I talked about here on gardens, trees and even houseplants. Learning to see order in the chaos of nature allows you to bring a new visual acuity to your photographs.

Kendra Rubinfeld

January 24, 2020

Photographing Bonsai, Bonsai People

Photographing Bonsai with Stephen Voss: A Winter’s Visit

Kendra Rubinfeld

January 24, 2020

Photographing Bonsai, Bonsai People

Washington, D.C. has resisted giving itself over to winter this year, with 70 degree days and only a handful of nights below freezing. On one of these warm January days, I visited the National Bonsai & Penjing Museum to photograph the trees in the winter light.

While the trees are the main attraction, the Museum grounds are not to be overlooked. The cryptomeria-lined entrance gives you the sense of moving from one world to another, emerging through the main gates to the courtyard where a single tree can be seen.

To find the majority of the trees, you must walk through the Chinese Pavilion, in which the trees spend the colder months. The open air building boasts a roof of translucent glass, which keeps the pavilion a few degrees warmer than outside. But more importantly, this glass is the key to creating some of the most beautiful light the Museum sees all year. The low-angled winter sunbeams scatter and soften as they pass through the panes but somehow still retain a certain crispness as they fall upon the resting trees.

The trees are often just inches apart from each other, allowing for one to observe the collection as a miniature bonsai forest – a remix of the typical presentation that gives each tree its own space. In these tight configurations, there are photographs to be made exploring the relationships between the trees.

There are signs of life to be found in the pavilion even a third of the way through winter. Camellias are bursting with blooms and the Chinese quince’s jewel-like green buds erupt skyward. Winter light in the Chinese Pavilion never comes from straight above, but shines from hard angles, reflecting the shortened daylight hours.

The Toringo Crab Apple, in training since 1905 and one of my favorite trees, still bears some small yellow fruit that faintly sways in the breeze from the circulating fan.

Winter is a season of rest and stillness, and I don’t think there’s a better time of year to visit the Museum. Over the year and a half that I was photographing my book – In Training, A Book of Bonsai Photos – the majority of the photographs were produced from the two winters I spent there. The bare deciduous trees become abstract forms, and it’s at these times that the invisible hands of the bonsai master’s work are most clearly seen.