Birds were how I got into photography, and still the majority of what I go hunting for. London is surprisingly good for birding - not much really rare turns up, but what is here is fearless. If you’re scared of people, you live somewhere else. Mostly I’ll be shooting birds in the local parks, but there’s also a wealth of reserves: Rainham Marshes, the London Wetland Centre, Rye Meads, Beddington Farmlands, and Walthamstow Wetlands are probably the ones I’ll most frequently visit. Everything here was shot with the Sony 200-600 f6.3.
There’s nothing wrong with bird-on-stick photos. I have loads of them, and some of the ones I like best are on here.
But my favourite photos are the ones which capture action or behaviour, like this pair of dunnocks squabbling over territory.
Like a lot of other pictures here, this was taken in Brockwell Park.
Rainham Marshes is out on the London outskirts. The landscape is bleak as hell, reedbeds studded with pylons and a horizon of distant industrial chimneys and slowly turning wind turbines.
As an aesthetic, it’s very me.
But while the landscape may be bleak, the story isn’t. Avocet used to be one of the rarest birds in the country - now seeing a group like this at Rainham isn’t unusual.
Sometimes shots are accidental. I took this one not because I thought it was a nice picture, but because there was a bird in the tree and I couldn’t tell what it was, so I snapped it to look at later.
But something about the bare branches, the small bird all alone - a redwing, it turned out - and the featureless expanse of sky became one of my favourite shots. The focus is the negative space more than the bird, one little life in a huge open world.
I wanted to try something different with this photo. the pose of the heron and the colours put me in mind of a Japanese painting, so I tried to lean into that with the colour grading and smoothing down the texture to give the impression of brushwork.
This was taken at Walthamstow Wetlands. I missed a shot of the heron catching a fish shortly after.
