Assignment 2 Research.

What I feel I need to do right now is focus my mind on my assignment theme so to do this I'm going to have a look at other work on the same theme to give myself some kind of starting point with my own work.

One of the first things I came up with is a competition run this year and last by the WWT (Wildfowl and Wetland Trust) asking people to enter images in the following groups Wetland Wildlife, Wetland Landscapes, Wildlife and People and World Wetlands. What captured my eye about the collection of images submitted is that to me its very much an exercise in illustrating to people the importance of wetland areas pretty much what I'm attempting to do with my own work. What I get from the majority of the work on the site is the fact people do tend to focus on the beauty of the environment which isn't a bad thing because it encourages people to visit the areas but as I've said before I don't want to sugar coat the facts by photographing in just the best light conditions I want to show the places as they the majority of the time, how anyone would normally see the places if the were to visit.
Photo Comp. WWT.

Nice article on the best ways to photograph Wetland environments by a WWT conservation warden, you'd imagine he know what he's taking about as he works in this kind of location more often then we would as photographers Guardian Blog.

More advice on how to approach Wetlands this time from ephotozine, don't usually find this site that useful but there's some interesting points raised here that I didn't know like reed beds act as natural purifiers to polluted water ephotozine.com.

 An interesting process which I hadn't really tried before was to look how other photographers on Flickr applied there skills to the theme, by typing Wetlands into the search box I was rewarded with literally thousands of photos and was able to gain a useful insight into how people view these areas and what parts most draw there attention. Clear a lot of people's work tends to focus on the wildlife which makes up a large reason why people are drawn to these areas in the first place, for myself I know this was one of the first reason I visited. One thing that does jump out is the fact that people seems a bit obsessed with shooting sun rises/sets over the water, yes its pretty and all that but it gets a little repetitive after the first twenty or so.