Images Matter: Why a Meet Your Neighbours Photographer is Perfect for Your Biodiversity Campaign.
At Meet Your Neighbours, we believe that images matter. Whether it’s for public outreach, reporting and accountability, site documentation or evidence gathering, professional imagery is the key element in your communications effort. Today it’s pictures, not words, that get your message heard. And the better the pictures, the clearer it is. Meet Your Neighbours is a worldwide network of specialised photographers documenting biodiversity against pure white backgrounds, in the field. Working with a MYN photographer provides your programme or expedition [...]
Malibu Coast On White.
The goal of my Meet Your Neighbours project is to raise awareness of the diversity of species living along the Los Angeles County coastline and motivate their neighbours (you and me) to protect the fragile marine environment they share. I find many of my subjects during low or minus tides, when the underwater world of tide pools is briefly revealed. Using a field studio, consisting of lighting and macro photography equipment, I am able to capture features that would otherwise [...]
Field studio birds – a start.
It’s been a slow start, but at last I’m making a little headway with photographing small birds in the field studio in our garden. Most species have shown an extraordinary reluctance to sit on the perches I provide – preferring instead to feed on the ground. This normally creates a lot of discomfort so instead I relocated a section of turf 18 inches above the ground on a crate, allowing me to shoot “at ground level” from my plastic hide. [...]
Clothesline Neighbours
Sometimes our backyard neighbours are be a bit more neighbourly than wanted. About a month ago my wife Bronwyn was collecting the washing from the line when she noticed a Shield bug (Poecilometis sp) on her clean slacks. Fortunately these days her first reaction to something with six legs is to call me rather than to squash it. Closer inspection showed it had also deposited a neatly arranged array of green eggs. Setting up the field studio I photographed the [...]
Beautiful Illustration of the Ibiza Wall Lizard’s Diversity
Many thanks to Neil Losin and Nate Dappen of Day’s Edge Productions for including MYN in their work on the Ibiza Wall Lizard in the Spanish Mediterranean! Neil has written an excellent post on National Geographic‘s Explorers Journal detailing how the technique was used to showcase the amazing diversity within this species on the islands of Ibiza and Formentera. You can read the article by going here. As you can see, there is a tremendous amount of variety in color [...]
Borneo Awaits, Joris van Alphen
Meet Your Neighbours contributor Joris van Alphen has just embarked on an incredible expedition to document the wildlife found on Borneo’s mysterious Mt. Kinabalu. Van Alphen, who calls the Netherlands home, is on assignment with National Geographic Netherlands/Belgium to cover the historic expedition, which is primarily comprised of scientists from the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Sabah Parks. The main mission of the expedition will be to answer the question of whether or not Borneo is a “Hotbed or Storehouse of [...]
Piotr Naskrecki’s Local BioBlitz
Via Piotr’s excellent blog, The Smaller Majority: During the last few days I was supposed to be a member of a team of photographers and scientists, whose job was to document the biodiversity of animals and plants of the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. This event, organized and sponsored by the National Park Service and National Geographic Society, aims to bring together scientists, naturalists, students, and all people interested in nature, to create a snapshot of the incredible [...]
Meet Your Neighbours Photographers and the International League of Conservation Photographers team up to photograph National Geographic Society’s 2012 BioBlitz at Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Meet Your Neighbours Photographers and the International League of Conservation Photographers team up to photograph National Geographic Society’s 2012 BioBlitz at Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Greenville, South Carolina – August 16 , 2012 – Meet Your Neighbours is pleased to announce a partnership with the International League of Conservation Photographers to photograph species found at the 2012 BioBlitz at Rocky Mountain National Park for the National Geographic Society. National Geographic will be conducting a new BioBlitz [...]
Niall Benvie: BioBlitz Bristol, 2012
Niall Benvie recently shared why it is important for people to get to know their local wildlife during a recent BioBlitz in Bristol, UK. In this clip, you can also see how Niall uses a “clear set” technique in this video to photograph insects with fine details. By suspending the clear plastic set over a sheet of white Perspex (or Acrylite) he is able to control the amount of light coming onto the subject, which allows the delicate form of [...]
Familiarity Breeds Indifference
The old saying that familiarity breeds contempt may be a little strong but it is probably fair to say that familiarity breeds indifference. Things that we see every day, incidents that are common occurrences get swept to the back of our minds and are glazed over so that we can concentrate on the unusual. This is probably a hangover from our stone-age past where it was important that if it was game to be hunted, we would not only see [...]