Sabre at that distance - even my turtle K20D + 60-250 manages to keep up with it (mostly) .

Number 1, 2 and 3 for me, great views.

Thanks for c&c.
Gareth, bird in 5 and 6 is nuthatch

Not the best light, but birds were active.
K20D + DA*60-250

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And my Dynaudio 52SE with Vincent SV-233 (modified) and some old Cambridge Audio (bit modified as well) have spent couple of years now packed in cardboxes, far away from me. My self prepared acoustics treatments for my listening room only get dust now hanging from the walls and ceiling...
Now CDs from PC on PC speakers, how sad...

All depends what is the reason for doing it and what one wants to achieve.
I don't think there is much point in starting with good stuff just to give it a bit more shine, but of course it may be some idea for "challenge", just what would people "judge"? that one applied a bit more sharpening or saturated colours bit more than other ?.
On the other side I get the point that starting with interesting image may encourage couple people more.

Nothing to be negative about .
In my opinion it was rather to have bad picture to try to extract/repair as much as possible (especially using RAWs), but as you said that thread died, so for new one someone may possibly learn from that.

I did start the mentioned Raw Challenge here, idea was to play with RAW file to fully extract potential of PP'ing (while provading bsic info of how effect was achieved).
First apperance and discussion following it is here:
https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/raw-challenge--1-11377/p-0

Well, Russia may be one of potentialy better uses of miles for intra Eu flight, but still (from memory):
12000 * 1.5 = 18000 + 2 * 7500 if you start your journey in Edi flying to LHR (or only 1 * 7500?) = 33000 miles + pay taxes

For not that much more miles (or even less if you combine them with cash element) you can get proper long haul flight in bussiness class (where BC is is worth much more than intra Eu flight), hence with high cost of miles these days its usually better use. But, having said that, you may have a lot of miles to burn, earn them easily, etc, then it doesn't matter that much .

OT, but if you have some numbe of miles (even better, miles with diamond club), booking flight to Europe is just a waste of them (apart of few destinations which are normally expensive most of the time). Number of miles needed for zone 1-2 redemption with diamond-club, plus potential surcharge for connecting flight from Edi to LHR plus massive taxes out of LHR( or just UK) to use for Eu (especially economy) flight - (in general) no no no .