January 2021 - Waving reeds

Regular readers of this column will know that I love spending time at the London Wetland Centre in Barnes. It’s run by the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust – a very worthwhile charity, founded by the famous Sir Peter Scott in 1946 at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire. I went there again in January last year – and as my photo shows, it was a lovely day. (Incidentally, we do seem to have had a lot of lovely days during the lockdowns which has been great fortune for us). 

There were loads of the wildfowl around (obviously!), and as ever it was a joy to see them and take even more photos of them. And the otters they have there were showing off for the visitors, something they haven’t done in my presence before … so that made it an even more special day. And there were a lot of flying reed beds, like this in the centre. I do like the feathery tops of these reeds and the way they seem to be floating in the breezes. And they are quite striking. I took this photo with a very wide-angle lens – 17mm – and so was able to capture the width of the reeds, emphasising their featheriness (?). I like the sense of distance that the wide angle provides; they are lenses that don’t get a huge amount of use, but when they do can be quite magical.