Caught this guy launching of the water's edge as I walked around the lake ... a hasty exit indeed.
Shot shortly after sunrise (facing East) on a relatively cold and grey morning. I liked the silhouette but not the flat light, so I pumped up the WB during RAW conversion (ACR 2.0) to give more of an "at sunrise" feel.
RAW conversion in ACR 4.0 with final processing in CS3, consisting of: Rotate and Crop, Selective Color adjustment to enhance the warm glow and deepen the blacks, Curves adjustment layer to pull a touch of shadow detail out and brighten the lights a touch for better contrast, Photo Filter adjustment layer to further refine the warm tones, very slight NR using Noiseware Pro then mild Smart Sharpen before resizing for web.
**** POST CHALLENGE ****
Just wanted to address the "composition represents more of an 'entrance' than exit'" series of comments. It's true it appears the bird is entering the frame, as composed, so my bad for overlooking that photographic element. The reason I chose this for Exit Challenge was because the bird had literally just lept off the water's edge and started flying away as I approached and captured this ... so it was exiting the scene in which it was shot, if not portrayed in the scene captuerd.
Thanks for all the comments.
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This is an absolutely beautiful shot, and a good capture. It stretches the challenge, a bit, I think, but not totally a dnmc. Without the title, I wouldn't know if the bird was entering or exiting.
Having the bird on the right makes it look like he's entering the scene; a slightly different composition with him toward the left would convey "exit" more strongly.
This gives more a feeling of entering the scene. To give a feeling of exiting the scene you could have framed or cropped the shot so that the bird was facing the edge of the frame on the right with negative space on the left.
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