Last weekend I was telling my dad about this little island in City Park where hundreds of cormorants gether every night. I've still not gotten my definitive photo of that, but I was there for about 10 minutes last night just for fun. It was shortly after sunset and I was working at a shutter speed that would give me a good balance between showing motion thru panning, but fast enough that I'd have some luck keeping some parts of the photo sharp and not lose the texture of the rippled water. That turned out to be around 1/125 of a second (it was a very fast pan).

My subject was cormorants that were flying low over the water, carrying sticks to build their nests. I was shooting with my Canon 7D on Daylight white balance and a Canon 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom...my "walking around" camera/lens combo (to change very soon...stay tuned!).

After making a few decent shots, the thing I didn't really like was the moodiness. It was getting dark and I wanted to get more of a cool, night-ish feeling. So, I switched the white balance to Tungsten and that really did the trick. I added a little contrast & color boost in Photoshop and had to do some noise reduction (in Noise Ninja) to account for the fact my shot was about a stop under-exposed and shot at ISO 1000.

All that in mind, here's how it all ended up!