Cormorant Descending

[Aidan Briggs]

Whew! It's been busy lately. Today is the first time I have had a few minutes to relax. Anyway, here is one from about a month ago. Taken on an extremely stormy day. We drove through dense fog, sheets of rain, and winds of about 50 mph, but when we got to the coast about 2 hours before sunset, it was clear. Not a whole lot of birds around so I went for silhouettes.

These are probably double-crested, but they some of them could be brandt's.

50D, 100-400 at 400mm
1/6400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 400
A bit of a crop, levels, and curves.

[Gail Spitler]

The different positions of the cormorants on the rocks plus the one landing make this a very interesting image for me. Well done
Cheers
Gail

[Phil Ertel]

Hi Aidan, I love this. The composition in my opinion is great. I like how the bright sun is balanced by the silhouetted rocks and birds. I find the color of the sky and clouds to be very pleasing. I also think the landing pose of the landing bird with the the one on the rock looking up makes the image. Well done and thanks for sharing.

[Dave Barnes]

I love the comp here, with the bird in the air leading your eye from the sun to the perched birds. Image works well.

[Morkel Erasmus]

my kind of shot. well executed, composed and exposed.

[Mike Lentz]

This is an absolutely perfectly composed balanced silhouette and the colors look great as well!:)

[Colin Knight]

Superb image!

Thanks for posting.

[Keith Bauer]

I really like this. The combination of the cormorants on the rocks and the one coming up with the strong sunset really make this come together. Very nice.

[Stu Bowie]

Hi Aidan, good call on going silhouette, and well timed to catch the cormorant coming into land against the sunset sky. Good job on the sun BTW.

[Kaustubh Deshpande]

Aidan, excellent excellent compostion. How bright was the sun? no flare?

[Aidan Briggs]

Thanks for the comments everyone. Kaustubh the sun wasn't too bright because it was just about sunset in winter. No flare.

[Nagesh Mula]

This is a very interesting picture Adrian. I liked it very and tried a number of times to take one like this.
However I am curious to know what do u use to avoid flares here and was the focus manual or auto.
Congrats on a very good picture though.

[Sid Garige]

Aidan,

I know how much thought process goes behind making an image like this.
Perfect execution.

-Sid

[Aidan Briggs]

Thanks for stopping by Sid and Nagesh.

Nagesh, this was autofocus. I prefocused on the rock so when a cormorant would come in to roost it would be easier to acquire focus. I didn't use anything to avoid flares. There just wasn't one in this picture. I am not sure why. None of the images I made that evening had flares either.