Jean Meile doesn't have to go far to pursue her passion for nature photography. Most days, her yard provides all the inspiration and all the fodder she needs.
"It feels like a wildlife preserve sometimes," she says. "It's amazing."
Meile, 41, has been interested in photography since she was a child, but grew more serious seven or eight years ago when she started taking more nature photos. "I would see a flock of egrets while I was driving, and I'd stop and pull off the road, to photograph them," she says.
Her developing interest grew even keener two years ago, when she spent the summer at a photography workshop at Maine Media College in Rockport.
"I came back trying to find ways to turn my photography into a career," says Meile, who works as an office manager for MBP, a construction management firm in Columbia. "But I found I needed the stability of a fulltime job, with benefits."
An avid traveler, Meile has taken photographs in Brazil, Argentina, Costa Rica and Peru, as well as less distant locations such as the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the Eastern Shore. But most of her shooting is done within a mile or two of the home she rents on Bonne Branch Road in Ellicott City. And most of that is done on her 1.5-acre property.
The property is heavily wooded and a creek runs through it, and the list of animals Meile has discovered there is surprisingly long. It includes, but is not limited to, deer, foxes, bats, raccoons, chipmunks, owls, red-tailed hawks, crayfish and praying mantises.
Not that her little corner of Howard County is immune to the county's relentless growth. A housing development being built just up the road from her house already has shrunk her wildlife world. "Development has definitely changed things for me — taken away some of my playground," she says.
Meile enjoys everything about nature photography — the challenge of finding and shooting wild things, the outdoors aspect of it, the eye-opening education her photos provide for people who see them and realize they were taken not in some far-flung, exotic locale but in the suburbs of Howard County.
Meile would love to make a living pursuing her passion, and she's sold a few photos and published a few in various publications. But making a living shooting nature photos is about as difficult as making a living writing fiction, and she is also a realist.
"I think, for the kind of photography I like to do, this is going to be a long-term hobby," Meile says.
Lucky for her, it's a hobby she's found a way to pursue close to home.
For more of Jean Meile's photography, go to http://www.jeanscape.zenfolio.com.