Being a busy bee plus Wildphotos and WWT London Wetlands Centre

It has been a busy few weeks since my return from Nepal. I have been mainly office bound sorting out the Workshops and courses I want to run next year, plus catching up on some image processing. I’m still working on the edit of my Nepal photos as well. I also ran off to London for the Wildphotos event, which I first went to last year. It is an expensive but highly interesting couple of days meeting and greeting the greats and fellow peers of Wildlife photography. The lectures are both inspiring and demoralising at the same time. The images are fantastic but the stories behind some of them are situations way beyond my means. Sometimes you get the impression that there is a slightly closed shop to newcomers, but in reality there are so many photographers chasing so little resources, agencies and editors will stick to who they know and trust to deliver the goods – the eternal getting your foot in the door problem arises for the rest of us.

There seemed to be a few trends in the lectures this year. Most revolved around having long-term projects and trying to get the message across in as many ways as possible – stills, audio, books?and video. These were being combined together or being promoted as separate entities in an overall package.

The second was termed Plan B, which became a euphemism for a wife or female partner to help out on location. The term was coined by Stefano Unterthiner, who left his location in Finland shooting Swans to come and judge the Wildlife Photographer of the Year entries, only to get a call from his wife that at the nest they had been watching the eggs were starting to hatch. “Plan B” had some quick photography lessons down the phone and stepped into the breach for a day till Stefano could get back to take over. Chris Packham announced that he is still looking for “Plan B”.

I popped into WWT London Wetlands Centre for one of my open days, and met up with and old school chum. We had a leisurely stroll around the centre and even though it seemed quite quiet with Coots, Moorhens and Herons aplenty, I?was pleased with some of the images. It has also given me an idea of photographing more of these species as I tend to over look them in the rush for something different.

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I’ve also remembered to enter some images into the WWT photographic competition this year. Normally I miss all the deadlines with competitions as I get distracted on something else!