Spectacular!

Last October we took a trip to North Norfolk for a night to go and see the Snettisham Spectacular.  It certainly didn't disappoint, spectacular by name, spectacular by nature!  If you intend to visit I strongly recommend staying overnight to avoid an excessively early start, depending on tide times, as naturally an early morning or late evening display is best for photography so pick your date carefully and hope for good weather! I would also advise getting there early as there were a good couple of hundred people lining the shore when we were there and you don't want to end up with a line of blurred heads in shot, or maybe you do...

The spectacular comes about from a quirk of the geography around Snettisham.  Snettisham sits about 10 miles north north east of Kings Lynn on the North Norfolk coast.  The reserve is a fairly long, but easy flat walk from the car parks and consists of a couple of lagoons protected from the sea by an earth bank.  Good shots can be had of some of the participants in these lagoons after the spectacular is over.  It is what is the other side of this bank that is the interesting part however!

The area sits right at the bottom of The Wash and as such has some huge mud flats.  When the tide is out mud flats can be pretty boring, but it's what happens when the tide comes in that makes Snettisham special.  As the water levels rise the waders that were once spread out across the mud get pushed into tighter and tighter areas that are closer and closer to the beach.  As these areas shrink more and more birds get squeezed in running towards dry land and eventually taking flight as they are scared by predators or run out of mud in mesmerising displays.  A good pair of binoculars allows you to get a good view of the waders running in what appears to be organised chaos, but, given the right light, when they take to the air binoculars can be ignored and the display of light on the birds as they twist and turn in marvellous synchronicity provides a truly amazing sight!  I only wish that I had a good quality video camera to truly capture the spectacular and so that you could hear the noise of thousands of birds passing over head.  Unfortunately I don't, so it will have to just be photographs!

Both images were shot with the same EOS7D and my Sigma 150-500mm lens at f9 1/400th ISO320.  I think I should have dropped the shutter speed and upped the f-number to make the whole image a little sharper.  I was more interested in trying to watch the spectacular display and capture the motion of the flock than making sure all my hundreds of images were pin sharp!  I think I managed to capture the motion nicely by using the way the light played across the flock as it twisted and turned.  Post processing involved spot healing to remove a couple of birds that were not fully part of the flock and in the case of the second image cropping to remove someones head!