A couple of years ago I saw a starling murmuration at the end of a cold day spent in Brighton photographing the ruinous West Pier. The sun had set by the time I wandered down to the surviving Palace Pier and I hadn’t contemplated photographing this strange wonder of nature, so a couple of poorly composed handheld shots were all I managed.

Last year I went about the task in earnest, hitting the north beach in Blackpool at sunset in early February but ultimately coming away disappointed with what I’d captured, so this time I was hopeful of something worth actually posting about.

After month after month of rain and a December marked by storms and floods everywhere, January 2024 kicked off with a cold snap, and one that’s set to last several weeks… all I had to do was look for a good sunset in the forecast, get myself in position about 15 minutes before it and see what I could do. So I settled on Sunday.

After a frosty start and some bright sunshine however the day descended in to overcast blandness and I knew it wouldn’t allow for the making of a good picture. The question was, would the setting sun descend beneath the blanket of cloud as it went down? And the answer I founds was yes. Yes it would…

Capturing this was a feelgood moment, worth taking a risk on a drive to the coast that might have been disappointing, and worth even situating myself under thousands of birds swooping and swirling low in the sky above me. I went for a reflection shot to maximise the potential of the scene, at one point thinking at had started to rain as droplets bounced in the tidal pool before me and then on me. Alas, it wasn’t rain dropping and I had to sponge my coat in several places when I returned home later…

The sun burned through the cloud on he horizon to create a fiery sky as it set between the ironmongery of North Pier, and I had to ramp up the ISO to maintain a shutter speed fast enough to capture the birds in any kind of sharpness, but there you go. A nice shot in the first week of the year, and already a contender for the 2025 calendar 🙂

Happy new year to you all.