Meet Your Neighbour

[Images for the Bio Blitz Concept]

Meet You Neighbour

Founded in 2009, Meet Your Neighbours is a worldwide photographic initiative created by Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt. The project is dedicated to reconnecting people with the wildlife on their own doorsteps – and enriching their lives in the process. These creatures and plants are vital to people: they represent the first, and for some, the only contact with wild nature we have. Yet too often they are overlooked, undervalued.

How does Meet Your Neighbours make this reconnection? Through producing inspiring imagery – the sort of pictures that make the viewer think, ‘I’ve got to see this for myself!” And then we encourage people to “meet their neighbours” through their own cameras.

Meet Your Neighbours images have an instantly recognizable look. Each subject 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.

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 novel way.

Please go to the photographer’s page http://meetyourneighbours.net/photographic-contributors/ and look at their work!

This technique is just right for the Bio Blitz Concept as it focuses only on the species. There is no distraction so you can see every detail in the image.

I teach this technique in workshops. Look on my workshop page for details.