Meet Your Neighbours / by Nathan Dappen

Along with Neil Losin I have been a contributing photograph of Meet Your Neighbors for about two years now and continue collaborate and contribute. Here is a sample of some of out MYN images:

Info from the MYN website:

Founded in 2009, Meet Your Neighbors 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.

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.

The initiative engages 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 novel way.

Find out more at: http://meetyourneighbours.net/