Thanks Steve U, Jan and Brant! Helpful comments. I intentionally cranked the blacks up to silhouette the hill partly to accent the sky, partly because I didn't want the houses to distract the viewer....but maybe I'll re-work it to see what it looks like brightened up a bit. Maybe the brightness setting on my monitor is too high - I think I have it set to 40 or 50%.

A quick question too: the initial HDR produced by CS5 looks very washed out and I find that I'm using LR to do all my tweaking (tone curve, up contrast, up blacks).....CS5 has more "power" though doesn't it? Should I be using it only for HDR PP?

Thanks for the tip on upsizing Jan. A couple of questions though. When I hover my cursor over the image, the metadata says its 92 KB in size (I uploaded a 800kb file i think). And when I copy the image out of TDP to, say, my desktop, right-click and read the metadata, there is none! My copyright, and camera info are gone.....ideas anyone?

@Jayson: Love that shot! I especially like how the light behind the tree is "mirrored" by the light just behind the ball....I like the symmetry of that effect.

@Brant: great shots of the ducks and the seagull is great!

Damian