This open source site brings together over sixty databases and 2,200 websites of federally-funded research and offers full text articles, citations and multimedia assets for projects that include photography across a range of STEM subjects from agencies like the Department of Energy or the National Library of Medicine. Results are filtered by categories such as text, multimedia, data, and public access.
Simply searching "photography" on Sunday, March 7, 2021 yielded 1,639 citations. Results are scoped on the left side of the screen by date or topic, and clicking on the "visual" tab narrows results into a color wheel visualization instead of the textual listing by topic. A search of "photography AND botanical" produced 549 citations, an example of which included a citation to a 2008 article by Niki Simpson and Peter G. Barnes, "Photography And Contemporary Botanical Illustration" published in Curtis's Botanical Magazine available from the publisher's Wiley Online Library website if your college or university library has a subscription, or through interlibrary loan (ILL).
Try searching "photography and clouds" which as of today yielded 1,148 citations with sub-topics such as high resolution, point clouds, or pictures, and a "multimedia" tab leads to creative photography from the NASA Image and Video Library. For example, see Storm Clouds over the Kennedy Space Center or a time-lapse photograph from a thunder storm in Norman, OK from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Photo Library. One result, a 2018 NASA conference paper, Earth Science Engagement through Art and Astronaut Photography, summarized a panel discussion about five decades of astronaut photography at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. This summary led to the Downloadable Earth Art website. "Visual Observations over Oceans", published in 1979, is a report from the Apollo-Soyuz test project. Volume 2: Earth observations and photography and described the challenges encountered by the crew charged with documenting ocean features from space.
Search "photography AND wildlife" and the 1,255 results include a 2020 article, "Pictures of polar bears: Using visitor employed photography to identify experience indicators in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." A search of "photography AND fine arts" resulted in 619 citations dating from the 1970s to the present. A four-page article, "Physics of Photography Course for Fine Arts Students," by Anthony John Galli, appeared in the March 1977 issue of American Journal of Physics. It explains the experience of developing this type of course in the 1970s at Louisiana Tech University. This is behind a paywall and available through your library's ILL unit if your library does not already subscribe to a serial package that includes this journal. Science.gov may yield articles that teaching faculty can consider when developing photography and STEM curriculum.