Illustrating the diversity of life

I have always been fascinated by the evolution and diversity of life on our planet. The living creatures, their sightings and their stories are still the subject of my surprise every day. To name a few:

• The sometimes unexpected sightings of omnipresent species such as the tiny silverfishes crawling away under the refrigerator or a fox showing suddenly up from the reedbed.
• The existence of species adapted to extreme circumstances such as the ‘insect-eating’ pitcher plants, the sperm whale diving for giant squids at depths of thousand metres and emperor penguins walking as far as 120 kilometers over the Antarctic ice to reach their colony.
• The evolution of extremely specialised forms of life such as the sword-billed hummingbird with a bill almost the size of it’ s entire body, trees depending for their survival on their inhabiting ant-colonies and beetles spending their whole life in dead wood.
• The occurence of as impressive as weird wildlife spectacles, such as the emerging of millions of magicicadas every 17 years, or the ‘blooming’ of the Tisza river caused by hundreds of thousands mayflies.

It’s this passion I want to share with others as I believe that strong images can contribute to the public’s awareness of nature’s wealth, which can make a difference for conservation.

Focus

Making good pictures with respect for the subject is a time-consuming activity and documenting every aspect of the biodiversity of a rich ecosystem is kind of a ‘mission impossible’. Because of this I lay my focus on the photography of my favourite animals, which are birds and ground beetles. Fascinated by their complex structure and the mindblowing diversity I developed through-out the years a passion for the old-grown forests and tropical rainforests. From the beginning of my photographic career I felt attracted to remote corners of the planet where I tried to document little known creatures.

The final goal of this website is offering a general overview of our planet’s biodiversity and showing a more specialized collection of birds, ground beetles and little known or difficult to observe species.

Respect for the subject

Whether you are making pictures from people, birds, mammals or insects, it’ s always important to show respect for your subject. In wildlife photography this means to me that you first have to understand the ecology and the behavioural aspects of your subject. This will severely reduce the chances of disturbance. I am convinced that there are no strict golden rules, but that you have always to take into account the general rules together with the local circumstances. For instance I generally avoid nest photography, but in Finland I took once pictures of Black Woodpeckers at their nest. The nesting tree was located in a graveyard in the city and the birds were just about to fly out. As the site was frequently visited by people, these birds were used to human activity and I am convinced this didn’t cause any harm. In a nature reserve in my hometown I often take pictures of wildfowl who are used to hundreds of visitors every day. Approaching the birds along the path, doesn’t have any effect on the foraging ducks and geese. Doing the same thing in a wide open rural area might cause panic and thousands of ducks flying away, which is totally unadvisable as they really need to save their energy during a cold winter.

Animals in the wild

Sofar all pictures on my site are made from animals in the wild. If in future, a picture would be added of a captive or pet animal, this will be mentioned in the comment of the picture.