Hi, my name is Catalin Stefan and I currently live in Dresden, Germany. I have started this hobby of collecting sand with a sample from my trip to south Thailand in May 2007, then got addicted and added a few more hundreds by trading with other fellow collectors during my half-year journey to Israel.

I use to store the samples in small lab vials (6 ml) bought from Sigma-Aldrich. Most of them are sands from different sources and origins (beach, river, desert etc.) but I also collect soil samples from places where sand is not easily available.

World Atlas of Sands is a collection of photographs, blog posts and geo-data representing my sand collection. The original website was aimed to be a photographic atlas of the sands from my collection, with small photo thumbnails created by scanning the real samples on a Canon Pixma MP800 scanner (real size of 5×5 cm). The website was created using the program called Gallery 2, an open source web based photo album organizer (please note though that all thumbnails are copyrighted and cannot be used without my permission).

Screen shot of the Word Altas of Sands featuring the old design

Beside the photo album I used to record additional information about my samples

Lately I decided to bring major changes into the design and functionality and developed the blog as main homepage platform. As per today I am still working on it and try to find a suitable solution for presenting all the information collected so far at the old site.

Please feel free to browse through the website and do not hesitate to contact me if you like to get more information about my hobby. My coordinates are:

Catalin Stefan
Gamigstr. 12
01239 Dresden
GERMANY

info |at| sand-atlas.com

Disclaimer. I reserve the right not to be responsible for the correctness of the information presented on this website and also for any contents linked to or refered from the website.