About me

I work as a health care professional in Den Bosch, Netherlands. Being an anaesthesiologist is a rewarding and at times, challenging job.

To find the balance, I combine this with my passion for wildlife photography. As long as I can remember, I have been interested in nature, looking for solitude and observing animal behaviour.

In 1990 I bought my first camera, and photography became a means to share the beauty of the natural world.

I live in the Netherlands with my wife Charlotte and our sons Jef and Louis.

About my work

I consider myself a slow photographer: as I need time to think about how to approach my subject, I will rarely return home with good images after a first visit. That is one of the reasons I like to work on subjects for prolonged periods. As I am observing and photographing, I get to know my subjects better and new, and sometimes better ideas emerge.

As I am not a full-time photographer, I can concentrate on just the subjects that I am most interested in. As these subjects never get boring to me, spending time photographing them is not an issue.

The combination of photographing the subjects I love most and investing a lot of time in them has given me the most success. I try to work on these subjects until I think my images are good enough to tell a story and to offer them to magazines. Over the years, I have participated in many photo contests as these contests provide an opportunity to get to show my work to a larger audience.

Publications and awards:

Photographs, stories and series have been published in magazines such as BBC Wildlife, Roots magazine, Camera Natura, Nat’Images, Terre Sauvage, Naturfoto, Landschap, Vogels, National Geographic (NL edition), Volkskrant, GEO and many others.

I regularly participate in prestigious international wildlife photography competitions.

Awards include:

Wildlife Photographer of the Year (UK): Highly commended 2022 and 2017

Nature’s Best (US): Highly honoured in 2015, 2013, and 2011

Asferico (Italy): Winner bird category 2022, runner-up bird category 2022, highly commended 2016 (2x) and 2017(2x).

European Wildlife Photographer of the Year (Germany): Runner-up Bird category 2021, Highly Commended 2013 and 2007

AFPAN (France): Special Prize of the Jury 2009, Winning series 2009, Highly commended images 2010 (2x), 2013, 2017

Bird Photographer of the Year (UK): Highly Commended 2020 and 2022

Nature Images Award (France): First prize Plant category in 2017, First prize in the bird and the telephoto category in 2016, Second prize in the series category in 2016

Groene camera (The Netherlands); Category Winner and highly commended images (4x) in 2022

Bio Photo Contest (Italy); Highly commended in 2022 (3x)

Glanzlichter: Winner bird category 2008, Highly commended 2013

Memorial Maria Luisa (Spain): Highly commended 2013

Lowland photo contest (Belgium): Highly commended 2016

Nature Photographer of the Year (the Netherlands): Runner-up 2020

Roots photo contest (the Netherlands): winner bird category 2013, several selected images in the years before.

David has been a jury member several times for the Roots (the Netherlands) and Lowland (Belgium) photo contests.