Project 1: Writing Descriptively; Describe a Photograph

Mixed Wader Flock at Sunrise.

For this exercise I have decided to use an image that I have taken recently, specifically for Assignment 1: Your Own Neighbourhood.  For this assignment I have chosen to photograph the Lincolnshire Coast at Cleethorpes, partly because I spend a great deal of time here walking, relaxing, bird watching and, especially, indulging in landscape and wildlife photography.  I have also chosen this location because I used it for Assignment 4 in People and Place and wanted to expand and improve on what I had done then.

 To me, Cleethorpes is a traditional Lincolnshire Coastal holiday resort and I wanted to show this in my images, but it is also set on one of the most important estuaries for wildlife, certainly in the UK, but possibly worldwide, holding as it does hundreds of thousands of waders and wildfowl migrating from as far afield as the Arctic to spend the winter here.  Immediately south of the resort is Tetney Marshes, an important RSPB reserve and a wonderful wild place with a remote feeling.  I have shortlisted for the assignment some close up bird images that I have taken on this short stretch of coast and even on the resort beach itself but they could have been taken anywhere really.  What I particularly wanted was a shot that showed the large numbers of birds and also some of the landscape.  For this particular shot I was up early and down at one of my favourite spots in the area, The Fitties, area of the resort, while it was still dark.  I arrived before sunrise and just as the tide was beginning to recede.  It had been a big tide and had brought large numbers of waders high up the beach.  It was beautiful down there and I had the world to myself; the only sounds being the sea, wind and the slightly bad tempered mutterings of the wader flocks as they jostled for position.  I was delighted above this to hear the very distinctive sound of two whooper swans as they flew in from the sea, a majestic sight.  Sadly it was still nearly dark and so I took no pictures.  The courlie call of curlews echoed across the beach making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up; a hauntingly beautiful sound.  As the waders began to move, I was delighted to get a shots of them against the sky which was painted orange by the rising sun.

Once back home I downloaded the pictures from the memory card by importing them into Lightroom 5.  Browsing through the thumbnails I could see that I had some potentially good shots.  I settled on this one to process as I could see that, although I was not shooting quite into the rising sun, the birds were beautifully backlit.  I also liked the way the birds seem to fall diagonally from top left to bottom right as they settle back down on the edge of the tide.  The image needed no cropping, just a sloping horizon slightly levelling.  The next thing in my workflow was to increase the exposure slightly and also slightly increase the colour temperature to bring it back to the beautiful warm orange colours suffusing the sky as I remembered it.  The final stage in my post processing was to increase the clarity and vibrance slightly and give a very slight increase in saturation.