At last, here we are! I feel a bit like this langur right now – grinning from ear to ear, because my website update is finally complete! After two years of hard work, my website is complete with all the content I wanted to add. It was quite the ordeal, with countless weekends and holidays spent editing photos, adding species, and completing pages for all the destinations I’ve travelled to. I almost cannot believe that I am finally done! Without further ado, let me break down for you what I have added and how my website now works (so that you can get around easily).

My collection of species

My species collection has always been the most important part of my website (for me personally). As a little kid I used to buy a ton of different booklets and binders, where I would collect animal stickers and fact sheets of wildlife from around the world, and I dreamt of being able to create my own collection one day. And here I am, thirty years later, being in the midst of completing my childhood dream!

So, here is what I have done. I have created a fact page for all the animal species I’ve managed to get an ok photograph of over the last 10ish years (489 species in total right now – and only mammals, birds, and reptiles). Some of these species have photos that I am not that happy with, but are so rare (or unique in some sense), that I felt I had to include them (such as the incredibly rare aardvark). There are photos of even more species on my hard drive (an additional 150 more or so), but they do not meet the standards I’ve set for this website (I am particularly looking at you common crane and common raven!).

So, how do you get around finding all my species on this site? There are two main ways:

Search

First off is search. You can use the wildlife search bar on the homepage. It looks like this (under the timeline):

You can find the same wildlife search bar in the sidebar of most posts and pages as well. Then it looks like this (nestled between “Wildlife Destinations” and a random species selected by my website – the rock pipit in this case):

This is what you can do with the wildlife search:

• You can search for any species (even use their Latin name), and if I have seen and photographed it, it will show up.
• If you want to search for a type of animal, but not a species, that is also possible. Say you want to see what eagles I have seen, then search for “eagles” and a list of all the eagles I have added to my collection will show up.
• You can also search by family and subfamily names for animal groups (such as “bovidae” for the family bovids, or “bovinae” for the subfamily of bovids closely related to cattle). Genus names are also possible (such as “panthera” for the big cats).
• I have added even more taxonomic ranks and groupings, both common names and Latin, so feel free to play around with it.
• If you want to see what animals I have seen in different countries, you can click on the “Globe-symbol” to the left in the search bar and choose country, and all searches will be for that country alone. Be sure to select “-World-” again, if you want to get back to my complete world list.

Through the top menu in the header

The second way of finding my species is by using the menu at the very top of the website. Use your mouse or touchpad to hover over “Wildlife”. A selection of various animal groups will show up. Each and everyone of these pages are clickable, and filled with photos of species and links to their fact pages. On mobile you open up the “Menu-icon” in the top right corner, and click on the arrow next to “Wildlife” to see the various animal groups. When you click on one of these pages, it will look something like this on desktop (but without the top images on mobile):

If you click on one of the groups below on this page (such as “Big cats” or “Small cats”), you will open up the group and see photographs of all animals I have seen and added to this group. These species are clickable and will take you to their fact page. In this case I have clicked on “Big cats” to reveal the various big cats I have seen and photographed:

Those are the two main ways of looking up the species in my collection.

What is on the fact pages?

• A slider of photos is found at the very top. Click on the images to see what camera and lens I used, as well as camera settings.
• There are sections you can open to read various facts about the species. The section “Pictures” also includes a gallery of all my photos.
• For some endangered species, a section called “Conservation” includes a collection of conservation organization you can support to help save that particular species.
• There is also a map showing the distribution of the species (marked purple), and markers for where I have photographed this species (and when).
• It will also be possible to buy photos on these fact pages, but that is still a work in progress (and only for species with good photos).

Check out the tiger fact page as an example that includes all of the above.

My destinations

I have, at the time of writing, visited 20 wildlife destinations where I’ve observed multiple species included on my website. Most are found in Norway, South Africa, and India, with a few in Sweden, United States, United Kingdom, and Tanzania (Tanzania was when I did research for my Master’s degree and before I got into wildlife photography, so I do not have that many species added from this country – but I felt it was important to include it).

The destinations should be easy to find. An easy way is to click on “Destinations” in the top menu, choose country, and you’ll get to a country page with a bit of info, a species list, and links to the various destinations – including a map showing their locations. You can also browse the destinations directly by scrolling down on the homepage and click through the “Destinations slider”. The same slider is also found in the sidebar of various posts and pages. 

Each destination page has a slider with pictures at the top, information for anyone interested in visiting the place, my own experiences, and a complete species list of the wildlife I got to see at the bottom. You can look at iSimangaliso Wetland Park in South Africa as an example (a place that means a lot to me).

The shop

This one is very much still under development when writing this. I just now (a few days ago) created an online store where visitors can buy prints of my photos. Over the years, many have asked if I sell my photos. While my main focus has always been expanding my collection of species, I’ve now finally decided to make my work available as high-quality prints and digital downloads. For this site to grow, and to go on more trips to add to my collection, I could definitely do with a little bit of a side income. At the moment of writing, I only have a few photos included, but you can get them as both prints of various sizes, and as high-resolution downloadable images. Here is an example of an image for sale as a fine art print and as a digital download. 

For my prints, I am currently using The Print Space as a print-on-demand service. I did some research, and they seem like one of the best in the business when it comes to serving high quality prints of photographs. They are a bit expensive to use compared to other similar services, but I feel like high-quality products are a lot better than cheaper low-grade prints.

Adding photos to the shop will be my next big project. Since each photo takes about 1 hour to complete (or more in some cases) before they are live in the store, this will be yet another project that will last a few months (I expect to add 2-3 photos a day, and I have a few hundred photos I deem good enough to put up for sale). If you want to tag along for the ride, I plan to add some of the photos going live on my store to my Instagram account too, to create a bit of extra interest around them. 

If you plan on becoming a customer, I’d advise you to register as a member of my site. Click on “My account” on the top menu bar, and it will take you through the registration process. 

The blog

Last but not least, a few words about blog updates. While I can’t promise weekly updates, I’ll definitely share more blog posts in the future as I embark on new adventures (because the rest of the site is now finally up to date and no longer holding me back). I will, very soon (on Sunday the 16th of March to be precise), add my long-awaited post on my fantastic trip to India. It is a bit lengthy, but hopefully you will enjoy it! I’ll add a link to it here once it is live.

That concludes the update on my website and all the work I’ve been doing! Please have look around on my site, and let me know if there is anything that seems off or is not working correctly.

Thank you for being part of my lifelong wildlife collection adventure!