ABOUT GARDENSAFARI

If you have any questions, mail Hania: photog@gardensafari.net

1 Why this website?

In a way Gardensafari website started unintentionally when my all time passion for photography and nature and my curiosity about web technology juxtaposed one day. The origins of the website date back to 1997. This is when I published the very first webpage showing about 20-30 photographs of fauna from my analogue photo collection. At that time I just experimented with programming in html and it was not my intention to achieve any serious and lasting results.
My photo equipment in those days was my trusty Nikon FA with a couple of Nikkor MF lenses. For macros I was using microNikkor 200mm with the extension rings. For telephotography, especially for capturing birds, I was using Nikon reflex 500mm and (again) microNikkor 200mm. Slowly the number of photographs was increasing and Gardensafari friends (like Hans Arentsen and also others mentiond below ) got engaged with helping to identify the species in my photographs and with writing articles on animals incorporated into the website.

The year 2000 was a significant milestone for Gardensafari. In that year I bought my first digital camera, Nikon CoolPix990. I explicitly selected Nikon CoolPix990 for its - in those days - revolutionary macro features and superb quality of images. I really liked this camera as a macro photography tool. The swivel mechanism on this Coolpix, where the lens and the LCD camera sections can be rotated independently, proved to be tremendously useful for close-ups. This feature helps to operate the Coolpix at otherwise impossible places and angles and to approach the subject as close as an inch or two. (Regretfully, Nikon discontinued producing the swivel mechanism cameras altogether.) The number of macro photos I was taking with this camera and I published on the website grew dazzlingly fast.
In 2001 www.gardensafari.net got registered as an internet domain and by that time the website had already counted about 50 pages with photographs and short descriptions of the species. The number of Gardensafari users and fans has been gradually growing ever since. I'm happy to hear that after all these years many of you are still sticking to this 'wild' corner of the web and that new visitors from all over the world discover and use it every single day.
Nowadays Gardensafari consist of well over a thousand of different species described on over 1500 webpages in two languages, Dutch and English. It is illustrated with many many thousands of photographs.

My main photo equipment for macros these days is Nikon DSLR D300 with a couple of Nikon micro lenses. My trusty CoolPix 990 still works after over 12 years of serving me perfectly well. The camera body looks slightly battered with scratches here and there and the image sizes are not up to current requitements any more. Therefore I have added the Nikon Coolpix P7100 to my camera collection. I use the Coolpix P7100 on occasions when I do not want to lug my 'huge' Nikon DSLR.
The elder photographs on www.gardensafari.net were taken with a film camera Nikon FA and with the digital Nikon Coolpix 990 and D100. More recent photographs have been taken with the Nikon D300 and Coolpix P7100.

The creation and the maintenance of Gardensafari as it is today took literally years and years of tedious work. My intention is to continue it as long as you - Gardensafari's fans, faithful friends and all new visitors - are interested in it.

Hania Berdys, December 2012

2 Photographs

All the photos on this website were taken of the species that were really in my gardens and houses or in direct surrondings from my home locations. There are just a few exceptions here and there on occasions when I use them for comparison purposes or in case of remarkable photos put in the 'Photo Of The Month' section. The photos taken elsewhere are marked as such in the photo descrtiption. Within the period of taking fauna pictures shown on Gardensafari I have moved twice and the gardens have been of different types and sizes: a suburban very small garden, a countryside huge one on the edge of a forest and, finally, to my current terras/balcony garden in miniature. These current more urban surroundings (though located directly by an old park) are full of various creatures, especially many kinds of beetles, bugs, flies, birds, moths can be spotted daily. You can see that interesting species can be found literally everywhere, even in the corner of your small balcony or by your front door.
I own copyrights to all the photographs here. Please don't use any picture without asking my explicit permission to do so.
All my pictures are available for publication. You can contact me for prices and conditions.

3 My photography pages

Besides my fascination with garden wildlife and capturing it I also like to travel and to hike. And of course I usualy take my cameras wherever I go which results in my colletions of travel and landscape photography. Every now and then you can see me experiment with all kinds of vintage cameras as well.
There is a separate section on Gardensafari website devoted to photography topics other than the pictures of garden fauna.

Click here to be taken to Hania's Photo Gallery.

4 Gardensafari's nuts and bolts

In the past this website had been maintained using Note Tab Light. Nowadays my main tools are unix shell scripts with 'sed', 'awk' as extremely versatile tools when editing many hundreds html files in a split of second. For little fixes I use jEdit. I test the results with FireFox and - if I have time - also on Safari and Internet Explorer. The pages can be viewed on most monitors, using a display of 800 x 600 or up. Frames are not used, javascripts are. All pictures are in .jpg format, so no problems there. The sounds on the bird pages are in compressed wave and can be made audible by any wav/mp3 player, such as WinAmp, Windows Media Player or by using Real Audio. All modern layout pages have a graphical menu bar at the top, a textual menu at the left side and a search engine to make navigation easy for you.

5 Support Gardensafari / Steun Gardensafari

If you like this site, making a donation through this button will encourage Hania to keep adding useful information and keep this website running. This is a secure payment by PayPal for which no PayPal account is required. Thank you!

Mocht u mij wilen helpen deze website in de lucht te houden door middel van een donatie, gebruik dan de onderstaande button. Dit is een beveiligde betaling via PayPal. Hiervoor is geen PayPal account nodig. Bedankt!

6 Featured Photos

In August 2005 Gardensafari introduced its 'Featured Photos' here:

For the archive of all Featured Photos go to this link

7 Gardensafari Links

8 Hosted Sites

Besides the GardenSafari and Hania's Photographer's Page gardensafari.net hosts two other special pages:
Tad Taylor's. Tad Taylor's page is a long story about his sad and dangerous experiences during the World War II when he was captured and held as the prisoner of war by the Russians..

9 Thanks

I'd like to thank all the friends of Gardensafari.net mentioned below for their invaluable help and content contributions to this site.

10 Literature list

The texts are based on general knowledge and on the following books and magazines: