New hosting & gallery launched!
8th May, 2018 | News & updates
Dear visitors of my website. Today I am finally officially launching the long-prepared gallery of birds in hand. During the process of preparing the gallery I realized that it will be necessary to migrate to a different hosting. My first intention was to host the photos at Flickr.com, but that turned out to be impossible to handle. Flickr gives each photo a random string of characters as its filename and it is very time-consuming process to link to the photos, especially if the number of photos will be several thousand. Therefore, I choose to buy a domain, with the same name as before but without the “czweb” part, and some disc space.
But back to the gallery itself. Right now, I managed to upload and process all the non-passerines I have in my collection (which is at the time of posting this blog 1030 individual birds and growing). Non-passerines form just a small fraction of all the birds in the collection but uploading and processing all the birds at once would be too time consuming, therefore I decided to upload pictures at several stages. I ask you to be patient, please. Right now, I managed to upload in total 57 individuals of 20 different non-passerine species. The list of uploaded individuals will be always available in the gallery changelog , as well as all updates to the gallery itself.
As you can see, among the uploaded photos are also some non-European species, e.g. the kingfishers or honeyguides. Those are species I photographed during our fieldwork in Cameroon and I hope there will be more of these species in the future. I have also a nice set of passerine birds from Cameroon, but I plan to upload these after I finish the European species. This might take a while, though. In next update, I plan to upload birds from some smaller families with fewer individuals photographed such as Cinclidae, Motacillidae and Prunellidae. When this update is out, and which species will be uploaded, will be announced, so you won’t miss it. Also, you can check regularly the above-mentioned gallery changelog, where I will put all the changes made to the gallery, including corrections of already uploaded photos.
But right now, you can enjoy the photos of the non-passerines. If you would find some error in ageing or sexing, please let me know. No one’s perfect. And I am far from that. If you will spot some mistake and decide to let me know, please, use the code of the bird. The code is always written above the set of photos in the gallery. Also, all the photos are licensed under the Creative Commons open license, so you are free to use them in your work if you properly attribute them. As taking all these photos took quite considerable time, I decided to put watermark on all photos. I was trying to optimize the watermark as much as possible to minimize its impact on the quality of the photo and not to be in way to the features used by ringers to assess age or sex of the bird. On the other hand, I would be excited if anyone would like to use these photos in some work or project (that is why I am doing these photos anyway) and if you have some interesting project, please do not hesitate to write me an email. If the project will be interesting, I can offer the photos without watermark.
I hope that the gallery will be useful for you.