MYN Diary I
05th August 2010
It took a while but the Meet Your Neighbours Project is finally in full swing here in Ireland. For those who haven’t yet heard about MYN here is what it’s all about:
Introducing Your Wild Neighbours
Meet Your Neighbours is a photographic initiative that reveals the wildlife living amongst us in an extraordinary way. These creatures and plants are vital to people: they represent the first, and for some, the only contact with wild nature we have. Yet often they are overlooked, undervalued.
Meet Your Neighbours dignifies these common species by giving them celebrity treatment. Each is photographed on location in a field studio. A brilliantly lit white background removes the context, encouraging appreciation of the subject as an individual rather than a species. Their own form constitutes the composition. Seen this way, animals and plants we thought we knew reveal another side of themselves, encourage a second glance, perhaps even renewed interest.
The initiative will engage photographers from around the world to celebrate these animals and ask people in their communities to “go meet your neighbours”. This is conservation photography at the grass roots level, asking people to care about their own natural heritage, where they live and showing them how extraordinary it is in a fresh way.
If you are tempted to ask “Well, why do we need orchids or salamanders, woodlice or bullfrogs anyway?” you may as well ask, “why do we need children, friends, community?” We can live without all these things but our lives are much the poorer if we do so.
Getting MYN up and running here in Ireland was a long and painful process. The main reason for this is a lack of funding and to some degree also a lack of vision on behalf of some conservation groups here in Ireland. Unfortunately photography for conservation doesn’t have the status here in Ireland it has in other countries.
Anyway I am very happy that AnTaisce – The National Trust for Ireland and The Burren Beo Trust are now endorsing partners of the project. I am even more happy that MYN will play a part in a new book project of mine. The deal however isn’t finalized yet but I hope to announce the details very soon.
After finding partners to support MYN the next step for me was to get the proper equipment together. So far I wasn’t very keen on using artificial lighting but for MYN it is a necessity. After experimenting with different light sources I finally settled for a Canon 430EX II Speedlight for the background and an Electra Eflash for illuminating the subject from the front. The Electra Eflash produces a very soft and natural light, which I prefer over the rather harsh output from a proper flashgun. The lights are now triggered by a wireless system. After I tripped over the cables regularly and almost smashed my camera I thought it might be a smart investment. In addition to that there are 2-3 tripods, several clamps, ballheads of different sizes, diffusors and reflectors in my bag. Honestly I rarely carried so much stuff into the field.
The photographic process is still new and very exiting to me and I am still on a very steep learning curve. Despite some throwbacks (a good deal of technical failures and a wet and windy Irish summer) I think I am getting there… The first images are made and I am looking forward to more.
The MYN portfolio can be found here.
MYN field set-up
CK, July 2010
Introducing Your Wild Neighbours
Meet Your Neighbours is a photographic initiative that reveals the wildlife living amongst us in an extraordinary way. These creatures and plants are vital to people: they represent the first, and for some, the only contact with wild nature we have. Yet often they are overlooked, undervalued.
Meet Your Neighbours dignifies these common species by giving them celebrity treatment. Each is photographed on location in a field studio. A brilliantly lit white background removes the context, encouraging appreciation of the subject as an individual rather than a species. Their own form constitutes the composition. Seen this way, animals and plants we thought we knew reveal another side of themselves, encourage a second glance, perhaps even renewed interest.
The initiative will engage photographers from around the world to celebrate these animals and ask people in their communities to “go meet your neighbours”. This is conservation photography at the grass roots level, asking people to care about their own natural heritage, where they live and showing them how extraordinary it is in a fresh way.
If you are tempted to ask “Well, why do we need orchids or salamanders, woodlice or bullfrogs anyway?” you may as well ask, “why do we need children, friends, community?” We can live without all these things but our lives are much the poorer if we do so.
Getting MYN up and running here in Ireland was a long and painful process. The main reason for this is a lack of funding and to some degree also a lack of vision on behalf of some conservation groups here in Ireland. Unfortunately photography for conservation doesn’t have the status here in Ireland it has in other countries.
Anyway I am very happy that AnTaisce – The National Trust for Ireland and The Burren Beo Trust are now endorsing partners of the project. I am even more happy that MYN will play a part in a new book project of mine. The deal however isn’t finalized yet but I hope to announce the details very soon.
After finding partners to support MYN the next step for me was to get the proper equipment together. So far I wasn’t very keen on using artificial lighting but for MYN it is a necessity. After experimenting with different light sources I finally settled for a Canon 430EX II Speedlight for the background and an Electra Eflash for illuminating the subject from the front. The Electra Eflash produces a very soft and natural light, which I prefer over the rather harsh output from a proper flashgun. The lights are now triggered by a wireless system. After I tripped over the cables regularly and almost smashed my camera I thought it might be a smart investment. In addition to that there are 2-3 tripods, several clamps, ballheads of different sizes, diffusors and reflectors in my bag. Honestly I rarely carried so much stuff into the field.
The photographic process is still new and very exiting to me and I am still on a very steep learning curve. Despite some throwbacks (a good deal of technical failures and a wet and windy Irish summer) I think I am getting there… The first images are made and I am looking forward to more.
The MYN portfolio can be found here.
MYN field set-up
CK, July 2010
