“It’s important to get people interested in their own environment,” she explains. “If you don’t know what’s in your environment, you won’t have a constituency that’s concerned about the environment. It starts at home, whether it’s an ant on the kitchen table, a butterfly on a flower, or a chipmunk at a feeder. The best part is, you don’t have to go far to find these types of things to shoot—you can head into your backyard, or to a nearby park if you’re in the city.”

Bailey Labovitz, one of the judges for Tamron’s Backyard Wildlife 2010 contest, uses her arsenal of Tamron lenses to show that you can capture pictures with personality of the flora and fauna that’s right under your nose. “I like to do full-bleed portraits of these animals, as well as plants, so people can see how beautiful they are and how much dignity they have,” she says. “It’s getting down to how these animals behave and interact as families. I want people to look more closely at the things around them and ask questions. For instance, you might not know that a boy box turtle has red eyes, while a female box turtle has plain old brown eyes.”

Bailey Labovitz typically uses the Tamron 180mm macro when she shoots caterpillar and the 200-500mm with a 1.4 teleconverter on it when she’s photographing birds, but it’s the 28-300mm VC lens that accompanies her most often on her outdoor adventures in the neighborhood. “I know this lens inside and out,” she says. “I know how far that background has got to be to be out of focus and clean. Because I know what the 28-300 can do, I’m able to visually estimate the results I want. Plus the lens is so lightweight—one day last week I walked for 13 hours. If you’re carrying a big lens while you’re out and about, who knows what you’d miss by getting worn out earlier than you should just carrying your equipment.”

The 28-300mm lens lets Bailey Labovitz achieve the beautifully blurred portraits of her wild subjects. “You want to make the animal or insect the story,” she explains. “I’ve shown a few of these portraits to some writers, and they’ve said that just by looking at the photos, they could tell a story about each animal. I always say less is more, which is what my pictures are like: There’s very little info in them, just the living thing and the feel of the environment and the light that it’s in.”

Bailey Labovitz approaches her wildlife portraiture much the same way a parent would approach a portrait of her child. “If you’re a parent, you want that portrait to capture the essence of your child,” she says. “After all, all kids have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth—but only your child holds his head a certain way while he’s eating his breakfast cereal, for instance, and that’s what you want to show. The same goes for animals and insects outside—you might think all butterflies are the same, but some flap their forewings while feeding, for instance, while others stay perfectly still. Look for what’s unique about a particular animal or insect when he’s in his natural environment.”

To decipher a particular species’ unique characteristics, it’s important to build up a rapport with them. “For my original series of photographs, I would get up every morning just before dawn and walk around the yard with a camera,” says Bailey Labovitz. “The animals eventually let me get closer and closer, because I walked around there every day. One day I wanted to see how long it would take a frog to come to the surface if I settled down by my pond—it took him 45 minutes, but he eventually emerged. Using the Tamron 28-300mm lens also means I don’t disturb their environment and invade their space: I’m at enough of a distance from them so they won’t stop eating or whatever else they’re doing.”

Knowing your subjects’ habits and behavior and how they interact with their environment is also critical to achieving fascinating photos. “People should get a sense of the environment that these animals are in in terms of the light they operate in,” she explains. “I prefer to shoot in the morning, because I’m a morning person and I like the cooler morning light. However, butterflies can’t even fly until it’s about 70 or 80 degrees outside. So I could maybe shoot a sleeping butterfly in the cold predawn light, but if I want to get them in motion, I’ll have to wait till later in the day when it’s warmer. In the morning I try to shoot frogs, since they’re just getting up and ready to bask in the sun. The best time to shoot cotton-tailed rabbits, on the other hand, is in the afternoon: They come back out to eat and the light streams through their ears in the most interesting way so you can see every vein.”

Bailey Labovtiz relies on the natural illumination of her subjects’ environment to show them off in the best light. “A teacher in one of my first classes told me you couldn’t take a picture of a butterfly without using flash,” she says. “Then I went out and did just that—without flash. There’s a reason for this: Butterflies get much of the colors you and I see when the sun hits them and reflects off of them. So if you take a picture of a butterfly with flash, it flattens all that out; you won’t see any of the color you’d see with your natural eye. Or, if you’re in the forest shooting plants and you use flash, you’ll get no sense of that damp, saturated gorgeous feel of the forest.”

Bailey Labovitz is currently working on an interactive children’s book that allows kids to take pictures outside and then submit them to a Web site along with a relevant fact about the animal or plant they’ve shot—merging the great outdoors with today’s tech-heavy recreational activities. She hopes to encourage more people to head into their yards and parks and take the kids with them to photograph the wildlife they encounter. “Children these days have mobile phones,” she says. “I’m not suggesting that’s the best way to take photographs, but with technology changing so quickly, that’s going to be the new Audubon type of collection a child can put together. They might start to gain interest in something they never had before. Plus there are so many occupations that can come out of this type of activity: entomologists, biologists, park rangers, medical research, and artists, for instance.

“I just want people to pay closer attention to the environment around them,” she adds. “They have to start somewhere—for me, the best place to start is at home.”

For more of Jackie Bailey Labovitz’s work, go to www.baileylabovitz.com.