May I introduce myself? My name is Jan Willem Bruggink. If you see my photo you may think that I am a big drinker, but it was the only digital picture I had. I got it from a friend.

I don't use a composer or something else to make my website. I program it all with my Microsoft Notepad in HTML 4 but of course I use a good guide that lies beside my keyboard.

The intention of this site is to show you a little of my holiday travels and give you a bird-report of the visited country. Most of my travels are not specially bird-travels but organised coach-trips with a group. All the little opportunities of free time during the trip are used for bird watching. You can see that in the beginning my reports are not very complete. I only present a list of the birds I saw during the trip instead of the exact places I did see them. I also made a note only the first time I saw a new bird. Beside the bird-reports, I complete it with a photo-gallery with pictures of each country.

I scanned the pictures with an Agfa Snapscan 1212U from normal 10 X 15 prints. Because I always carry a binocular, the photos are made with a Pentax Espio Mini with a 32-mm lens. During my last vacation in Sri Lanka my camera tried to swim in the Indian Ocean. That is not good for a camera, so I had to buy a new one! The pictures of Scotland are made with the compact camera of my wife, a Ricoh FF-9 with a 35-mm lens.

Before our journey to Thailand I bought the very compact Pentax Espio 120Mi with a zoom lens of 38 mm to 120 mm. That gives me more possibilities, although I need a little more light. The largest diaphragm is 4.8 instead of 3.5 of my old Pentax Espio Mini.

When I had to develop my photographs of Ireland 2002, I saw an advertisement of the Blokker Company. Colour prints on Kodak paper and also digital pictures at a Kodak Picture CD. I did so and I am very content about the results! I worked them up with Adobe Photoshop 5.0 LE.

During our Iceland-cruise, I spoke many people who possessed a digital camera. The many advantages of such a camera, did me also decide to buy one of these cameras. After weighing the pros and cons at the end of September, I bought the Pentax Optio 550. A 5 mp camera with a 5 x optical zoom lens from 7,8 mm - 39 mm (37,5 mm - 187,5 mm). With an aperture from f/2,8 - f/4,6 is the luminosity very good for this lens. With the macro facility you can take pictures from 0,65 m to 0,15 m and with super macro to 0,02 m. The camera is very compact, with a little size of 100 x 59 x 39,5 mm. Now I only have to wait for the next journey!

The real test of my new camera took place during our journey to Indonesia in 2004. I used the little program Irfan View with batch conversion, to reduce the pictures till they reached the wanted size to use for my website. If I compare the digital pictures with the older scanned photo-prints, they are sharper. However you may think, the whole digital process is much faster, you are making a little mistake! By using a digital camera, you will take much more pictures. It takes a lot of time to select the right number of photographs. Looking at the result, I do it with a great pleasure.

Visit the photo-albums!