It was a last minute decision that took me to Whiteford Burrows. I was hoping to get some photographs of the birds that frequent the area in Winter. I knew the tide wasn’t quite high enough to push the waders and wildfowl onto the marsh, but usually there are a few lapwing, crows and smaller birds around. With this plan in mind I only took my 800mm lens with me. Not surprisingly on my arrival I didn’t see that many birds and had to resort to detailed landscape views instead. I did get a treecreeper land on a tree trunk less than two and a half metres from me, but as my minimum focusing distance on the lens is four metres, I just was forced to stand there and watch it instead.
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The sun was starting to drop towards the horizon and had disappeared behind one of the pine plantations when it found a break in the density of the trees and started to shine through. I took the two images above and am still deciding which one I prefer. The closer image shows more of the light coming through, but the initial image has a more mysterious feel to it due to the darker parts of the photograph. At the moment the wider view is winning, but this may change with time.
I was hoping that the reeds would house a few birds, but nothing appeared. The wind had picked up and probably if there were any birds present they would be sheltering deeper in the reed bed. The sun was lighting the reeds and with the background in shade they stood out well. I tried a few variations but the horizontal image above worked best.
There are some great shaped trees on the burrows of all sizes. Most show the prevailing wind direction and have been shaped by the wind in some way or another. The dense pine plantations show less influence of the wind, but have some great pine cones visible on them.? The shape of the laden branch below caught my eye and proved to be an intriguing image in both colour and black and white.
