yet another gull

Another seagull. I know.
I have so much real work to do but yet it is 11:30 at night and i am sitting alone in the dark masking out this seagull that i shot today during my daughters soccer game. Crazy i know.
Its times like this that we often ask ourselves why we do the things we do. The answer for me is enjoyment and the satisfaction of creating an image that i am happy with. Everyone would have their own reasons of course but i think the one thing that photographers would share is the need to create images. Its like an addiction but worse, its part of who we are. Be it photos of seagulls, people, landscapes, or whatever. The subject itself does not really matter.
For this photo i made a duplicate layer and bumped the contrast way up with a curve and then changed the layers mode to multiply. This gave me a pretty funky sky but made the gull pretty well black. I masked out the gull from this contrast layer so it kept its detail in the underlying layer. I sharpened the photo and thats about it. The masking took awhile but i thought in the end it was worth the time.
Looking at the photo now i realize that i should have darkened the bottom right corner some more so your eye would stop there and bounce back into the image. Some sleep right now is more important however.