Game Over, Man!

"Those to whom we say farewell, are welcomed by others"

Today I finished work at the hospital where I've been for the last 4 years. I realised this week that it's about twice as long as I had been at my previous (first) job as a specialist.... I'll try to stay longer at the next one. ;-)

Though overall it should be a good move, I am sad to leave behind my team, who are without a shadow of a doubt the best part of the service I'm leaving.

I'm clearly easy to read, as they gave me as a leaving present, a photography book, and a couple of iTunes store credit jobbys - with the notion that I can get some more photography apps for my iPad. 8)

Also bidding me farewell today were some of my beloved lorikeets. They haven't been much in evidence lately, but the wet weather this week has brought them out in great numbers. I took a few shots of these two and another with them this morning on the way in. I chose this shot to blip, even though the others showed more colourful plumage, because of the way the one coming in to land looks: it rather reminds me of a facehugger from the Alien movies, or perhaps someone from a Kung-fu movie. ;-)

This took a bit of processing, as there was such contrast between the sky and the tree and lorikeets. After cropping it, I pulled down the RGB curve rather a lot to get the blue back into the sky. I applied that with a mask using Filterstorm Zoro's colour match tool. I had to raise the slider quite a long way, which appears to soften the mask/make it less opaque ... something anyway, which got rid of the nasty edges that were there initially. After that I pulled up the luminance curve - on the background layer, I think, so it didn't affect the sky. Then I sharpened it, and added a duplicate layer set to screen, with quite low opacity to just brighten it all a wee bit.

Large version here.

Unprocessed version here.