Yesterday I spent about half an hour down the road at the inlet with my camera. I then spent maybe 2 hours at my computer looking at and processing the light I had gathered. Down by the waterside, I was looking through a window approximately 1 cm square, down a long metal and glass tube at a bird which was about 12 metres away and moving quickly, so until I got the picture up on the screen I didn't know exactly what I had captured. I knew what I hoped to get: the beauty of these ungainly birds and the stillness of the late morning and the constantly changing web of life into which the fish and the spoonbills and the mud and the water constantly weave themselves. But it was only later that I could see the shapes and textures of the feathers,and the way the bird and its reflection formed an oval, interlocking with the ring on the surface of the water, and the subtle vertical lines of the falling droplets. So I trimmed the image, emphasising shape and form, cutting out the things...