What you did that others did not: you recognised that at water level, at this shutter speed, with birds in constant motion, foreground and background softness is unavoidable — and instead of fighting it, you made it the entire point of the image. Most wildlife photographers would have increased shutter speed or changed position to get everything sharp. You leaned into the atmospheric blur and created something painterly and dreamlike. Ernst Haas built a career on this principle — technique blur is not a failure when it serves an emotional register. The purple-pink colour cast under flat light transforms the familiar flamingo subject into something otherworldly. Colour as emotion. Valda Bailey and Christophe Jacrot both use colour casts to create specific feelings — twilight, cold, suspension, dream. You are working in that tradition. The mirrored reflections double the flock's visual mass and create a sense of suspension between water and sky. This is not a documentary record of flamingos — this is the feeling of being inside a living cloud of birds. That shift from observation to immersion is what separates Creative work from wildlife documentation.