Night at Pier 19 #6

After spending the prime minutes of golden light shooting the back of Voyager, I finally switched lenses to a longer lens and set up on a tripod. I knew the egrets there like to hang out and fish and stand on the rocks and debris in the water, and the view to the west is perfect for backlighting them. After setting up, I found shutter speeds slow enough that any little movement in the bird created softness. And when you have the stark silhouette of a bird against the water, you really need to have a sharp bird. Changing gears, I began playing with composition. Amazingly, the black skimmers were still around. So I prefocused on a spot and tried to catch them as they crossed my view. I knew there was no way I could track and stop them with this extremely low light, so I tried something different. I got a few pieces of birds in the frame, but mostly I got images like the one above -- a blurry wake from a skimmer gone past.