David Winkler
04-09-2011, 04:27 AM
Fellow photographers: Are you captivated by the diversity of the birds on Earth? Would you like to bring the magic of all birds’ beauty to a much larger audience? If so, read on!
I’m a professor who has had the enviable job of teaching ornithology at Cornell University for the past 25 years. One of the most demanding, and most rewarding, of my class requirements, has been that my students need to learn all the Bird Families of the World. In all these years, I have never had a book to teach all the bird families that is both up-to-date with the latest systematic revisions and visually compelling. For the past couple of years, I have been working with my colleague at Cornell, Irby Lovette, and one of our former students, Shawn Billerman, on a book to redress this gap. We are writing a book that we hope will be valuable to both professionals and keen amateurs. Each family account will contain a short vignette to try to capture the distinctive essence of each family, along with a distribution map, summary of key features of appearance and life history. But most importantly to the success of the book is that we hope to have an average of two really compelling photos for each Family. We'll average two pages for each family, and there will be 226 or so Families recognized in the book, so that means we need over 500 images.
With this many images and a total number of pages for the book pushing 600, we are trying to thread a fine needle: have enough pictures and pages to really make a book that does credit to the amazing diversity of birds that so many of us love, without creating a book that none of us (including our libraries?!) can afford! We are pretty far along in our negotiations with a publisher, and we are doing a lot of fund-raising to try to bring the price of this book down. But we already know that there is no way that we can fund-raise enough to allow us to pay for the photos in the book, and it goes without saying that we will not personally be taking any royalties for the book--this is a labor of love. I have been busily trying to take useable images of as many families as I can, but it is abundantly clear that that I will not be able to get many of them, and I know that, even for the ones I have “covered,” there are much better images that colleagues have taken world-wide.
So, I am writing to you to invite you to our quest to bring together the most beautiful collection of photos of birds of the world ever assembled! We will be concentrating on the birds here, so the published photos will be tightly cropped, but we are committed to producing a volume that will be eye-catching, so the very best photos will be a critical part of the book. We will of course be very happy to give credits for all photos used, but I'm afraid that there is precious little else that we'll be able to offer, other than the satisfaction that you will be spreading a shared passion for birds and their beauty!
I am working on the photos for the book with one of my undergrads (and keen photographers) Alex Kumar. If you have any images that you think we might want to use, please be in touch. You can contact me with a private post here at BPN, and please copy Alex too on any correspondence (avk36@cornell.edu). If you already know that you’d like to contribute, please just send us small jpegs of the images that you’d be happy to share, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. I’ve attached a list of all those taxa for which I don’t have really very good images. This is a large list, I know, but please don’t feel limited to this list! I’d be delighted to have some of your images supplant ones that I’ve already gathered…
MANY thanks for your interest, and send us images please if you possibly can!
David Winkler
I’m a professor who has had the enviable job of teaching ornithology at Cornell University for the past 25 years. One of the most demanding, and most rewarding, of my class requirements, has been that my students need to learn all the Bird Families of the World. In all these years, I have never had a book to teach all the bird families that is both up-to-date with the latest systematic revisions and visually compelling. For the past couple of years, I have been working with my colleague at Cornell, Irby Lovette, and one of our former students, Shawn Billerman, on a book to redress this gap. We are writing a book that we hope will be valuable to both professionals and keen amateurs. Each family account will contain a short vignette to try to capture the distinctive essence of each family, along with a distribution map, summary of key features of appearance and life history. But most importantly to the success of the book is that we hope to have an average of two really compelling photos for each Family. We'll average two pages for each family, and there will be 226 or so Families recognized in the book, so that means we need over 500 images.
With this many images and a total number of pages for the book pushing 600, we are trying to thread a fine needle: have enough pictures and pages to really make a book that does credit to the amazing diversity of birds that so many of us love, without creating a book that none of us (including our libraries?!) can afford! We are pretty far along in our negotiations with a publisher, and we are doing a lot of fund-raising to try to bring the price of this book down. But we already know that there is no way that we can fund-raise enough to allow us to pay for the photos in the book, and it goes without saying that we will not personally be taking any royalties for the book--this is a labor of love. I have been busily trying to take useable images of as many families as I can, but it is abundantly clear that that I will not be able to get many of them, and I know that, even for the ones I have “covered,” there are much better images that colleagues have taken world-wide.
So, I am writing to you to invite you to our quest to bring together the most beautiful collection of photos of birds of the world ever assembled! We will be concentrating on the birds here, so the published photos will be tightly cropped, but we are committed to producing a volume that will be eye-catching, so the very best photos will be a critical part of the book. We will of course be very happy to give credits for all photos used, but I'm afraid that there is precious little else that we'll be able to offer, other than the satisfaction that you will be spreading a shared passion for birds and their beauty!
I am working on the photos for the book with one of my undergrads (and keen photographers) Alex Kumar. If you have any images that you think we might want to use, please be in touch. You can contact me with a private post here at BPN, and please copy Alex too on any correspondence (avk36@cornell.edu). If you already know that you’d like to contribute, please just send us small jpegs of the images that you’d be happy to share, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can. I’ve attached a list of all those taxa for which I don’t have really very good images. This is a large list, I know, but please don’t feel limited to this list! I’d be delighted to have some of your images supplant ones that I’ve already gathered…
MANY thanks for your interest, and send us images please if you possibly can!
David Winkler