This was a hard one to decide on. Today, I was at Adam's and Hobb's reservoirs in Layton as part of the training for my new dam safety position; I got some sweet photogs! I had already narrowed down my choices to two pictures that I loved. I edited them and was about to delete the others when this little part of one of the pictures I was about to delete caught my eye. I loved it more than the other two and decided to keep it because of the emotion it evokes in me. The direction the birds are flying literally and symbolically suggests the end of a season. The shapes in the picture are so soft and unintrusive; there are no hard lines; it just makes me feel peaceful and reassured when I see it, so it was the winner.
It looks like a water color painting but it's not, and it looks like I did a water-color filter but I didn't. It's blurry because of how far I cropped in, and that's exactly what the picture needed. After cropping I actually increased the blur with the lens blur tool in the distortion drop down menu in Photoshop CS3. The blur made the brown colors in the birds' wings and bodies less disjointed and really brings out the mood of the cool day. If you look at the edges of the shapes, there is a little bit of a fade. I thought this was another appropriate feature that lent itself to embodying the waning season. I bet when I look back at this picture in a couple of years, I'll be able to recall exactly what part of the year it was by seeing nothing more than the birds and the water.