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Five years after I was born in Leiden (Holland), in 1961, my family and I moved to Amsterdam;
ever since, I have been living in or close to that city. Somehow, I was a born naturalist. For
instance, already as a young boy I reared all kinds of caterpillars I found close to our home.
When I was about 15 years of age, my friends started to choose a group of insects they focussed
on. The ususal groups were Hoverflies and Dragonflies, but I chose Butterflies - in part because
this group was still 'available', in part because they are so beautiful, and probably also because
of my earlier rearing of caterpillars. Somewhat later, around 1980, I started photographing
butterflies, first all season round, later on only during the holidays.
This restriction of my activities to holidays in part had to do with getting a job etc - but my
fanatic pursuit of butterflies had started to wane, too. I guess there were several reasons for this,
one of them being the paucity of butterflies around my residence in Holland, a place not particularly
renowned for its rich butterfly fauna. Another reason was that I got bored with 'hunting species'.
My last butterfly holiday was in 1996, when rainfall ruined it as well as our car.
Around that time, the internet gradually became accessible to a growing number of people, and just
to stay in tune with modern technology, I started to make my own website, Natural History Photographs.
At that time, small files were still an asset, and web design virtully non-existent. My primitive website
served its purpose well - I mastered html. It also served other people well - they enjoyed the photographs.
But after some time, new developments in webdesign and the vast increase in memory space and rates of file
transport rapidly made my website obsolete.
The next decade I kept my general interest in nature, but started to do other things, like buying a
house, marrying a wife, getting children; in short, the usual stuff. Children ask a lot of time, so
regardless of interest I had little opportunity for frantic wild life pursuit. But once our children
were past four years, I gradually got more time and for some reason, which I don't recollect too well,
in spring 2006 I decided to refurbish my outdated website. Memory space being no longer an issue, I
could present much bigger photographs on it; I began to scan lots of slides. My wife Karen created
a new look for my website and I inflated it tremendously.
Playing around with scans and html, I got convinced of the advantages of electronic material, and
in July 2006 I decided to buy a digital camera: a Nikon (D70s) with 105 mm macro-objective. The stunning
detail already visible in my very first photographs forcefully awoke my dormant spirit for observing
wild life, which then underwent full renaisance. Although the season for insects was already almost
over when I started photographing, I immediately re-experienced the thrill of the hunt! That hunt was
no longer exclusively for butterflies though. Because they were rather scarce on our holiday, I started
photographing flies, which proved to be a nice substitute.
After a dull winter, in 2007 I tried to make good for my 'lost decade', by using every minute
opportunity to go out and photograph. The result was a wealth of material, at risk of getting lost
in my electronic archive. To counter that risk, I use my website as an electronic album - websites
are especialy suited for that purpose. And because other people might find some of my photo's useful,
I think it is a good idea to make my electronic album publicly available.
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