As there was no chance at all to find a crying jackdaw (or any other black bird to that matter), it was clear from the start that this is going to take a lot more post processing than usual.
Jump inside to read how I hunted down the bird and how the image came together.
First off I needed to get a picture of the bird. And just my luck, the day I set myself out hunting was the day all of the birds in Gothenburg were on vacation... For two hours I could not even see a single crow or jackdaw or anything similar. Not until it came to me, that I need to go to the dirtiest place in town- the central station :) So, the birds were there, but I could never reach them with my kit 18-70 Nikkor lens. At that time new train rolled to the station... The front was all covered in mosquitoes and the bird fiesta started. They were pecking that train without bothering that there was some guy with a camera just one meter away...
Here is the picture I picked out of about 30 shots:
Now all that was missing was a nice background. It took me two weeks of waiting until I saw the perfect sky for this shot. It was almost dark then and the clouds looked just perfect.
All was here. Time to glue things together. Cutting out the bird is easy, all you need is patience. Selected it with as much detail as I could manage, copied it into the cloud picture, put it on the fence. Now making the bird cry was something I've never done before. Internet saved me once again- found a great tutorial on drawing tears by Globator.
Afterwards the whole image looked just a bit fuzzy, so I over-sharpened (using unsharp mask) the birds body only, making the eye, tear and feathers be more contrasty and standing out of the image.
And we're done. I finally heavily post processed an image :) It was used as background for the song on youtube.
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