This is a shot which I have been wanting to capture for sometime.

These are the the Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) which spend the winter in Brighton, UK. They are about 40,000 strong and after putting on a stunning acrobatic display over West Pier go home to roost within the pier's structure. This "dance" happens every night at sunset and is watched by many awestruck people of all ages.

I have wanted to photograph it since the first time I witnessed it but I wanted to do something a little different.

This is 2 seperate images combined. They are both framed the same, I left the camera and tripod set up awaiting the display. I wanted to combine a long exposure of the pier, with the sun setting directly behing it, and a much faster exposure of the Starlings themselves.
Firstly I set up the camera and used a 10 stop ND filter to achieve an 80 second exposure of the scene. I added a 2 stop grad filter to hold back the sky. This was shot some time before the birds appeared.
When the sun had dropped almost below the horizon the birds began to appear flock by flock. I carefully unscrewed the 10 stop filter from the lens and re-attached the grad filter.
As the birds were grouping together in an evergrowing mass I made some test exposures to determine the shutter speed which worked best. Eventually I stuck with a 1/30 sec which gave some nice bluring but kept the birds obvious enough in the image.
Having found my settings I just kept opening the shutter everytime the Starlings came in close over the pier. I took about 200 shots in total and have chosen the one I thought worked best for this final image.

I have combined the 2 images in PS. I am by no means an expert at this kind of Photoshop work so I will not go into the detail of how it was done. It's not perfect but I have done my best and I am happy with the result.

As soon as I returned home after spending the weekend in Brighton I saw some images in my inbox here of the same pier and Starlings taken by Acraith [link] please go and have a look.