Whether or not it was said in jest it reminded me that animals photographed in pairs often seem to make more interesting compositions. My wife, Trish, repeatedly asks me to print "her swans" as she now calls them. I must have taken this photograph over two decades ago - I can't remember the year exactly although I remember the actual occasion well - and she has had to ask me many times because it's a so-and-so to print!

I'd been making an almost daily 200-mile return trip from our home in Wiltshire to the London studios of Thames Television where I regularly freelanced for more months than I now care to remember. To lessen the odds of becoming a traffic accident statistic (I'd driven sixty-six thousand miles every year for three years in succession for that company) I would turn off the monotonous motorway after an hour or so and meander back home on the quieter country lanes.

Driving due south-west throughout the winter months was never made easier because the setting sun was more or less ahead and shining into the eyes. However, photographing in that general direction at that time of year often recorded remarkable lighting conditions... all you had to do was stop often, squint into the light, narrow the field of view with a chosen lens... and click away!

As an aside - and this was written before I bought a digital camera - the one thing that digital photography has done is to get people to take photographs more often and throughout the entire year. In the past it was all too common for one 24-exposure colour film to be loaded in the camera... invariably holding the snapped secrets of two Christmas dinners at either end and the family summer holiday in the middle! Now that daily downloads to a computer are the norm people have more instant fun with their photography knowing they can wipe the "so-so" and "no-no" images from the disk, drive or memory rather than be recorded, usually embarrassingly when seen in retrospect, in the fear that 5x7 inch glossy prints of questionable "treasured memories" will be handed down for posterity.

Late one Winter afternoon, driving over the canal bridge in Hungerford, Berkshire, I saw two swans beautifully backlit by the sun. In those days, because of working in TV studios, my cameras of necessity rather than choice (though it's a pretty difficult decision not to use them out of choice) were Leica rangefinders. I used both the M4/2 and M4/P models which, to those who may not know, don't have built-in light meters.