Johan W. Elzenga is an award-winning freelance photographer and editor at two Dutch photography magazines. He also writes stories and makes photographs for a number of other magazines all over the world. His article “Why zebras are striped” was published in five languages and six countries and it seems that even the famous Desmond Morris was inspired by it. Morris’ book “Animal Watching” was published more than one year after Johan’s article was first published in the UK (World Magazine, October 1989) and it contains a chapter “Why zebras are striped” in which he uses a remarkably similar approach in trying to answer this question. Johan is the author of the first Dutch book about the camera RAW format; published in July 2006. Since then, he has published about 20 books. Because these books are in Dutch, information about them can only be found on the Dutch version of this site. Johan has published numerous tutorials and workshops about Photoshop in various magazines. Some of those tutorials are now also on this site (also in English).

Johan’s photographs are sold world-wide through the Internet image brokers Alamy.com and several microstock agencies, such as iStockPhoto. Some of his photographs can also be bought as fine art framed prints. See the menu ‘Buy Images’. Although his photography covers a broad spectrum of subjects, Johan’s preferred subjects are wildlife, landscapes and travel. Over the years he has travelled to Africa some 50 times and visited Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the islands of the Seychelles, Reunion and Mauritius. His Africa stock contains more than 100,000 photographs of animals, landscapes and people. For the Dutch tour operator Thika Travel he has lead a number of special photography tours to Africa, but he stopped doing tours for personal reasons.

Johan also has an extensive collection of (medium format) landscape photographs from the American South-West (California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona), including well-known places like Grand Canyon and Bryce Canyon, but also lesser known places like Nevada’s Valley of Fire and the stunning “slot canyons” of Arizona. Obviously, he also works closer to home, so The Netherlands (Amsterdam) and other European countries can also be found in his photo stock. Other places that he has travelled are Egypt, Iceland, South America (Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Argentina), Costa Rica, China, Japan, New Zealand and Indonesia (Bali). In 2004 Johan changed to digital only. He is now using a Canon EOS 1DX, a Canon EOS 1Ds MK III and a Canon EOS 1D MK IV as his primary three cameras, and Canon EOS 1Ds MK II as back-up. Recently, he also bought a Sony A7R and a A7R mk III for landscape images. These cameras are mainly used with Canon lenses, through a Metabones adapter.