Natural History Photographs

In About this site I state the focus of this site in a qualitative sense; here I justify that statement in a quantitative sense. The tables below give an impression of the numbers of species in the various groups I focus on, and in which countries they were photographed. Photos of other animals, plants, and landscapes are not accounted for in this overview. Since this site started only in earnest after I started with digital photography in 2006, I will only analyze developments after 2006. This only affects the data on butterflies, since this was the only goup I photographed before 2006. The totals for butterlies are thus not fully consistent with the numbers in the body of the table.

Early 2010, this site sported some 3570 photos showing nearly 1100 species. The groups having my first priority, Diptera and Hymenoptera, account for resp. 39% and 26% of the species shown. Groups of second priority are butterflies (19%), beetles (12) and dragonflies (5%). The index (under Find) provides a further specification within these major groups. Table 1 specifies the distribution of photographed species over the countries I visited. Just over half of the species is photographed in the Netherlands, the other half in some 10 countries (those with only photos before 2006 are not tabulated). Table 2 shows that the vast majority of species (85%) is photographed only in a single country.

Figure 1 shows the increase in the number of species in time. Most species are first photographed in April - June; outside this rather narrow window few new species are photographed; and none of course during the winter - except for my visit to Australia in December 2008.

Figure 2 shows that ca. 25% of the species is represented by just a single photograph. Some 18% is represented by five photos or more, the maximum being 20.