How it all began

On a beautiful summer day, countless butterflies populated our slope covered by wallpepper, which was just in full bloom. I was totally fascinated by this swarm of colorful insects. It had such an amazing variety! Since most butterflies were constantly in motion, it was important to me to capture the moment in a photo. At first I had only moderate success. The zoom of my first camera was simply not good enough forcing me to get very close to take detailed pictures of the butterflies.  I was also struggling with the sharpness of the camera as soon as the animals moved.

Hence, I bought myself a bridge camera with a 15x zoom, pretty much the maximum for amateur photographers.
Using this camera enabled me to take much better photos and I got all excited every time snapshots with new butterflies arrived. That's when the hunting fever began. I started to get interested in the name of the different species and and the first species I looked at were moths. They are difficult to identify and  homepages and respective ornithologist forums helped me a lot with the identification. For some of them German names don't even exist. Alternatively, one may use the scientific names but I had no ambitions to push that further.

During my excursions through the immediate surroundings, my interest for other flying creatures, namely dragonflies and birds, was quickly aroused. Once I had set my focus on birds the fun begun as they are also active during winter times opening up more opportunities to capture them in different surroundings. At the same times, the challenges increased. With birds a lot of luck and skill is needed to reduce the distance to the bird, somthing that is necessary for pictures with a good resolution. Yet, the more difficult task also let the fruits of my effort taste sweeter.

I was amazed at the diversity of the species the countryside had to offer and   getting closer enabled me to  recognize  more than sparrows and blackbirds.

With my increasing focus on birds, my camera had reached its limit and I bought a reflex camera that came with a fast autofocus and triggering  technique. As the technology is still rapidly developing

  Here the technology is still developing rapidly, so that it is also affordable.
When traveling to distant countries, there is always a lot of new discoveries to discover and then to determine. With more than 10000 species worldwide, this only works properly, if one knows what kind where. Accordingly, I have created a database with the country lists. On avibase.bsc-eoc.org there is a selection of such lists of different organizations. In the assignment to unique German names, I have invested a lot of time until I get to the book Media-natur.com/fotolulu.
 Whose author had the same motivation as me. However, the database is never finished properly, since much is in motion in the classification of especially the nearly 30000 subspecies. In addition, more than 10 different scientific names are now circulating in some species. So far I should not have had to drive it, because over the 512 species occurring in Germany one is quite unanimous and on the short vacation strips I certainly do not come to birds, which is still scientifically debated.
Finally, after the first vacation on the Red Sea with the many colorful fishes, it was close to trying to underwater photography with new challenges like fluctuating water and sun on the display.
So now make yourself a picture of a small part of the biodiversity.
Certainly I'm under the determination to make mistakes, which I would like to correct, of course, if someone can give me hints.