September 2008: Brian E. Small
I guess that for me birding is in my blood. My father had me in the field with my own bins by the time I was four years old. I remember during my early years just enjoying being outdoors with my dad and discovering all the new plants and animals we’d see wherever we went. That lasted until I was about 14 when I discovered girls and rock music and those became my new hobbies for the next 10 years. But I always loved to travel and take pictures and so I always had an interest in photography. After graduating from college, I found a renewed interest in birds and I began to try photographing them on the weekends. I quickly learned what a truly rewarding challenge bird photography could be and I was hooked. My passion for creating beautiful images of birds grew from that point on and I knew that becoming a full-time professional bird photographer was my calling in life. More than twenty years later I’m still incredibly passionate about every new bird image I create.
About Brian
Brian E. Small has been a full-time professional bird photographer for more than 20 years. He began birding and photographing birds as a very young child with the encouragement of his father, Dr. Arnold Small. Dr. Small was a renowned ornithologist, college professor, and one of the founding fathers of the American Birding Association.
Brian has been a regular columnist for WildBird magazine for the past 12 years writing articles on birding, bird finding, and identification along with bird photography. He has been a member of WildBird’s advisory board for the past six years. Brian also currently works as the Photo Editor for the American Birding Association’s membership magazine Birding.
Just some of Brian’s magazine photo credits include: Time, The New York Times, Audubon, National Wildlife, Nature Conservancy, Wildlife Conservation, Living Bird, Birder’s World, Bird Watcher’s Digest, North American Birds, Western Birds, Outdoor California, Arizona Wildlife Views and many more.
Brian was selected as the primary contributing photographer for the newly published Smithsonian Field Guide to the Birds of North America by Ted Floyd. He was also chosen to be one of the top contributors for Kenn Kaufman’s recent book The Kaufman Field Guide to the Birds of North America. Brian and Kenn have also been working together for years on a bird identification column for Birder’s World magazine that appears in every issue. Brian’s work has been featured in Stokes Field Guides, Audubon Field Guides, Peterson Field Guides, Thayer Birding Software, and in numerous books and calendars from the National Geographic Society, the National Audubon Society, Houghton Mifflin, HarperCollins, Academic Press, The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Princeton University Press, Mountain Press, Falcon Press, Companion Press, Ibis Publishing and many more. You can learn more about Brian and his photography on his website at: www.briansmallphoto.com
