Gull on a Rail

Way back in August of 2009, I was the proud owner of a Nikon D80.  And as mentioned before, I had no idea how to use the thing.  And to prove that point....
*Road Trip*
I've downloaded Nikon's free photo editor.  I'll probably never use it to edit anything, but my real goal was to have an OEM tool to read XMP file information.  This helps when I'm going down memory lane.  And it is much easier to read than Adobe products RAW file viewer. 
*Road Tip Over*
So in August of 2009, I was in North Carolina.  Part of the day's trip was to take a ferry across a lot of water from somewhere to Fort Fisher.  Near the end of the  venture when we were back in the car ready to exit, right outside the car landed a sea gull.  I flipped the camera toward the bird and whoosh.  Moment captured in time.  Instant professional photographer.  Auto mode, kit lens and all.  
Back when life was much simpler, I thought this was a great shot.  OK, colors were a bit flat out of the camera.  (Had no idea why I was shooting RAW at that time.)  The bird's white shoulder is really close to being totally blown.  But other than that, the red piping, the black metal siding, the detail of the rope and the white lettering was in my opinion 'da bomb'.
Over the years, I've used this photograph in my printed portfolio as a beginning point in my artistic journey.
*Another Road Trip*
The photo club to which I am a member is trying a new activity.  Members offer up photos to the group, and everyone get a shot at how they'd post process the image.  I though this one would be interesting as there are many aspects one could choose based on interests.  And so I thought I'd publish my efforts. 
*Road Trip Over*

The settings:

See the Programmed Auto - yes we all have to start somewhere.

The RAW Image:

What I thought would be good years ago, from the original PSD file:

So I have some darker blue in the sky, but at the cost of a blue 'reflection' in the black metal.  And I see I have changed the colors of the bird, and not in a good way.  Blow it up just a little and my new nemesis, noise, is really in the metal.  I have areas to attack.
With old standby software, and some new software this is what I did.  
I'm trying to update my workflow with AI Clear.  Does it come early?, does it come late?  I'm on day 9 of the trial still trying to figure it out.  But in this case, AIC was more in the beginning. 
The workflow:
1. Single RAW image to Photomatix, Soft 4 preset.  This balanced the light levels for me.  With that much black and faded sky, with the white bird, Photomatix handle the independent levels much better that PS.  
2. AI Clear - hit it with the Max setting.
3. ACR Edits.  Usually some form of straightening, spot removal and in this case I used a graduated filter to darken the sky up a bit.
4. Topaz Detail.  So playing around with this product, I removed any remaining noise to really smooth out the metal and increased the black to remove the 'blue' haze that was introduced earlier.  Very neat little tool.
5.  A better crop.
And this is what I came up with, 8.5 years later.

I'm still not totally happy with the sky, but it is what it is.  If I remember right, it was a cloudless day with lots of vapor haze.  Maybe something I will fix in another 8 years.

Two Real Close

From the Reno Air Races, I found I focused on shots where there were more than one aircraft in the frame.  Helps with the whole picture tells a story thing.  
When photographing the Patriots demo team, I would often not get close enough to the subject to get a good shot.  And that is the case here.  This shot was taken at 277 mm.  There's a lot more lens I could have used.  Rookie mistake.
I've already worked most of the can't miss efforts from that trip , so now working with the reach projects.
And project is an understatement for this one.  I've been working for three days on this.  I tried On one, Gigapixel, DeNoise and PS.  And what wound up working in the end is AI Clear - just confirming what I've found before.
So here is the original RAW image.

ISO 800, f/6.3, 1/8000 sec, 227 mm

NIKON D7200 Ver.1.04/70.0-300.0 mm f/4.5-5.6

For me, this will require a super aggressive crop to be interesting.  Even if I wanted to get three subjects in the frame, it would still require a aggressive crop.  But I want the two to fill the frame.   At that tight a crop at ISO 800, from new experience gained, that nice sky will not be the same.  This is precisely why I started searching for a product to help smooth out the sky without destroying the rest of the image.
Here is the cropped product.

This won't win any sharpness awards and barely passes the monitor test, but it will make my screen saver rotation.  The good news is that AIC did exactly what I wanted it to do.  Sky looks great and a lot of the air craft graphics are sharp.  For some reason, the 3 on this side is off color.  What had me going for a few days was I could get the sky right, but the PATRIOTS graphic would never clear up.  Its natural silver reflective flak with red outline was no help at all.  Seriously, no help.  The missing piece turned out to be Topaz's Detail.  Just a little slider here, a little slider there and the image (graphics) improved greatly.  (Turns out I purchased Detail some number of years ago, who knew?)
So, note to self, get the frame right the first time and you won't have over software to get the shot you want.