A grey heron will let you within about forty metres, and no closer. Move slowly and it may halve that. Rush it and it lifts over the willows, leaving you with an empty frame and a reminder that wetland photography is mostly about one thing: the distance at which your subject is still behaving normally. Lens, hide and editing all exist to protect that margin.

Watch first, photograph second

Give yourself twenty minutes at a new site before the camera comes out of the bag. Sit somewhere comfortable and work out the baseline: which birds are feeding, which are loafing, where the flight lines run, which pools the coots are squabbling over. Once you know what normal looks like, you will notice the instant it changes. A head comes up. The chatter stops. A feeding bird freezes mid-step and turns its eye towards you. That is your cue to stop moving, back off a few paces and wait. Most species settle within a minute or two if nothing follows.

The photographs you lose in the first five minutes are rarely as good as the ones you take in the next fifty. Wetland birds are also far more tolerant of a still human shape than a moving one. Become part of the bank and the moorhens, ducks and even the occasional water rail will drift within range.

Fieldcraft: cover, wind and quiet feet

Stay low. Reed margins, sedge tussocks and hedgerows do most of the work for you, and a crouched approach along an existing edge beats a direct walk across open ground every time. Keep to paths and boardwalks: marginal vegetation is fragile, and it is disturbingly easy to crush a nest you never saw.

Wind matters less for scent than for sound. A breeze carrying noise away from your subject covers the rustle of waterproofs and the squelch of wet ground, so plan your route with that in mind. Move when your subject is feeding or preening. Freeze the moment it looks up.

• Step, pause, repeat. A few paces, thirty seconds of stillness, a few more. It feels slow. It works.
• Skip the playback. Recordings and bait pull birds away from feeding and can stress them badly in the breeding season. Many reserves ban both, and rightly so.
• Read the return trips. A bird carrying food or repeatedly heading to the same patch of reeds is almost certainly near a nest. Withdraw, and come back in a few weeks.
• Keep away from roosts at dusk. Disturbing a winter roost costs birds energy they cannot spare on a cold night.

Some species have extra legal protection from disturbance at the nest in the UK and elsewhere. Rules differ between countries and between reserves, so check with the site warden or the relevant conservation body before working anywhere near breeding birds. This is general guidance rather than legal advice.

Lenses: pick for the distance you can honestly reach

Most wetland subjects sit twenty to eighty metres away and intend to stay there. A 300mm on a crop-sensor body will handle herons, gulls and confiding ducks. Waders, kingfishers and anything on the far side of a lagoon want 500mm or 600mm, or a shorter lens plus patience and a better position. A 100–400mm zoom is the sensible first serious investment: flexible, usually with a close minimum focus distance, and light enough to carry all morning.

Small subjects are a different job. A 90–105mm macro gets you dragonflies, damselflies and frogs with working distance to spare, which matters because you should not be leaning over them. Teleconverters add reach at the cost of light and a little sharpness. They cannot fix poor fieldcraft, and neither can a longer lens. Learn where a kingfisher habitually perches, then sit near that perch with modest glass and decent light.

Hides, screens and the car

A public hide gives you more reach than any lens you own. Arrive quietly, slide the windows slowly, and rest the lens on the shelf rather than jamming it against the frame. If your camera has a silent electronic shutter, use it. Shooting through scratched glass rarely ends well, so open a window a crack and shoot through the gap.

Away from reserves, a bag hide or a metre of scrim net draped over the tripod works well, and a bean bag on the car window ledge is one of the most effective hides ever invented, provided the engine is off. For waders and amphibians, a ground pod or a folded mat will get the camera down to their level, which is where the good pictures live.

Amphibians and insects: get low, keep your hands off

Most frog and dragonfly photographs fail because the photographer is standing upright. Kneel, sit, or lie flat and use a flip screen. Once you are level with the subject, the background becomes water or sky instead of mud and boot.

Amphibians have permeable skin and are vulnerable to disease, including fungal infections that have caused serious declines in wild populations. Do not handle them. There is no reason to pose a toad on a prettier leaf. Do not move spawn or tadpoles between ponds, and clean and dry boots, nets and tripod feet between wetland sites as a matter of habit.

Insects reward early starts. Dragonflies are sluggish and approachable while temperatures are low, damselflies roost in reeds, and dew sits on wings for the first hour of light. Approach from the side, shade the subject with your body to soften hard light, and work slowly enough that the insect forgets you are there.

Edit like you were there

Exposure, contrast, white balance, dust spots and cropping are all fair game. So is removing a discarded bottle from the foreground. Removing a leg ring, a radio tag or a fence post is not, because it erases part of what the image documents. Nor should you composite a bird onto a different background, swap a dull sky for a dramatic one, or clone in a reflection that was never there. If a picture is built rather than taken, it is an illustration, and it should say so.

Go gently with sharpening and noise reduction, which between them can turn soft feather detail into a crunchy mess. Use flash sparingly: it can startle roosting birds and is best avoided with amphibians altogether.

A quick check before you press the shutter

1. Is the animal behaving normally, or have I already changed its behaviour?
2. Am I standing on something I should not be, or blocking someone else's view?
3. Is the light honest, or am I about to fix it in software?
4. What am I leaving behind, and what am I taking away with me?
5. Would I be comfortable if another photographer did exactly what I am doing?

Wetland photography rewards stillness more than kit. Pick one pool, learn it across a season, and sit with it in the cold and the drizzle until the birds forget you are there. That is where the good frames come from, and it is also the quietest way to enjoy a marsh.

Photo: Yan Krukau / Pexels