My Online Bird Photography Portfolio

I've been updating my SmugMug photo galleries a lot over the past 6 months. I have reorganized my Birds of Ontario galleries so that birds are organized into families and species, more-or-less according to conventional taxonomy, although there's a fair bit of wiggle room here since even the experts diverge in some places. It's still incomplete: not all species have been given their own galleries yet (although most most have); I'm missing some very common birds that I take for granted; and I'm missing some less common birds, but ones I should really have photographed by now (can you believe that I don't have a single photo of a Snowy Owl!!!). I've been keeping a log of major updates at the top of the main page. My goal is to have the taxonomic structure finished by early summer 2020, and to continue filling out some of the thinner galleries over time. Here's a link:

https://mactavish.smugmug.com/Birds-2019/Birds/Birds-of-Ontario

Why I Use SmugMug:
Most of my bird photography colleagues use Flickr to share their photographs, so you might wonder why I selected SmugMug.

Six or seven years ago, I went looking for an online service to host my photographs for public and private viewing. This is around the same time that my bird photography shifted from fascinating pastime to very serious pursuit. I compared many services and narrowed it down to two: SmugMug and Flickr. Ultimately, I selected SmugMug for a few reasons, the most important of which was that SmugMug did not make any claims to any rights over my photographs. Flickr, on the other hand, claimed non-exclusive rights to use your photographs for promotional purposes, and possibly other purposes (I don't remember their full terms of service). That was enough to tip the scale. Since setting up my SmugMug account, Flickr was acquired by SmugMug and I don't know if they've updated the terms of service to match SmugMug.

One of the benefits of Flickr is its implementation of some social networking into the service, by which I mean users can form communities and share, like, and follow people. I don't think SmugMug offers this, or if it does, I'm unable to find how to do it. It is clearly not a priority for SmugMug, whereas it's one of the main selling points of Flickr.

My Favourites Gallery:
Another update I made recently to my SmugMug portfolio was to create a new "Favourites" gallery. My plan is to update this gallery regularly. I might change the design so that it's similar to my "2019 Bird Photography Highlights" where I write a short piece about each photograph. But for now, it's up and running as just the photographs with species name. You can find it here:

https://mactavish.smugmug.com/Birds-2019/Favourites/

That's it for today, but let me end with a recent photograph of a Common Goldeneye. Hamilton is a great place for winter ducks, so expect to see more ducks here and in my SmugMug "Favourites" gallery:

Common Goldeneye