David Bogler is from the St. Louis area. He has always enjoyed the outdoors and studied wildlife management, horticulture and botany at the University of Missouri – Columbia. He obtained a doctorate in botany from the University of Texas at Austin. Research in Sotol (Dasylirion) and the Agave plant family has taken him all over the Southwestern US and Mexico. He taught courses in biology, botany, ecology and evolution for 5 years at UT, and worked for a few years on DNA techniques at Fairchild Tropical Garden in Miami. David currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri where he works at the Missouri Botanical Garden. His botanical articles have appeared in Systematic Botany, American Journal of Botany, Brittonia, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Botanical Review and other journals, and as well as Steyermark’s Flora of Missouri (Vol. 2 and 3) and the Flora North America project .I have been interested in photography since high school. Photography has been an important tool in my technical work as a botanist, and also a source of artistic and aesthetic pleasure. Plants, gardens, and natural landscapes are the primary subjects of my pictures, with occasional forays into buildings and monuments. I try to achieve a balance of color, form and symmetry, with the ultimate goal of producing pictures that look attractive and generate feelings of peace and tranquility, or moodiness. Lately I have been leaning towards the abstract.