Picture This

My name is Ashgan. I'm a diverse Photographer. I live just outside Saskatoon, SK, with my husband and two children. We love our simple, small community life and live for outdoor adventures!

My love for nature, especially PLANTS, awakened my old love for capturing the beauty in my environment and documenting a moment in time. It allows me to tell a story without using words. My goal is to capture genuine, authentic emotions in your pictures, to record your special moments to cherish and share with others for a lifetime.

A little about what Sphagnum means and why I picked it to represent my work:

The Boreal Forest in Saskatchewan makes up about 101 million acres in size. Within the Boreal Forest, there are Boreal peatlands or wetlands. The ecosystem of these peatlands is engineered by a non-flowering plant called Peat moss or Sphagnum moss.

In nature, the accumulation of Sphagnum moss happens through interaction between them and their habitat. Sphagnum moss dominates large areas of the boreal peatlands and creates these habitats through their growth and production of decay-resistant litter. As they invade, they can quickly transform a high-pH fen (a type of wetland) with little peat accumulation into a bog (a different type of wetland) where large amounts of carbon are stored.

Their ability to shape and transform mires drives a strong relationship between the peatland and everything that lives within. The layered Sphagnum is highly resistant to decomposition — so sterile — that humans buried in Scandinavian bogs have been recovered with very little change to their looks after several hundred years of interment.

These interactions among plants, fungi, bacteria, water, dead organic matter, mineral ions, available plant nutrients, and the chemical characteristics of the environment are examples of the processes known as "the ecology" of the boreal.

The ecology of the Boreal is similar to how all species interact with their surroundings. The interaction between the subjects in front of the lens and their surrounding environment is essential to understand and capture. From there, I can present an ecology specific to the subject's habitat, representing their place or natural self.

"Like a bog building a dome of peat moss preserving moments in their long life that will last centuries, Art can create an ecosystem capturing moments in time that will last for many generations."