One Up One Down

I was amazed to get reasonably close to this pair of Kildeer, they are normally skittish. Their calls are a constant companion at the moment. Reputedly they lay their eggs on the ground and if there is a threat, they scurry along the earth trying to draw attention away from the nest. They are quite hard to see against the dry soil. Another surprise was that there were two pairs, I didn't know which way to look.

Interestingly, I seem to have an out of focus foreground bird against sharp earth and behind a sharp bird against a soft background. A different kind of alternation.

I ran the image through Topaz Sharpen, but it played havoc with the soft background and, although I could isolate the effect to the bird, then I didn't have noise suppression. So I used DeNoise first on the whole image and Sharpen on one bird.