Welcome Home...Yes, the 34 is an amazing aircraft...however, I prefer Hueys we have 3 that we restored back to flight status...The org. I belong to...American Huey 369...the 34 came from N.Y and met us at Grissom and our 2 Hueys and the 34 flew to WI were we met a friend with a restored Loach and the 4 aircraft flew to LZ Lambeau...it was a sight to behold!
As for my critique of this photo thank you so much for your kind words...

Who knows, who cares, this system of taking a Jpeg into the Raw editing of Photoshop works for me for the times I need to bring out the shadow arears of a photo, which is rare because most of the time I "Get IT Right In The Camera".
All the details are there, I print 20X30 show prints that win awards year after year after year, who cares where the pixels come from, as long as I am happy, my clients are happy, who cares, I'm not counting pixels, neither are my clients.
Besides, the Jpeg image that went into the RAW processing comes back out as a Jpeg for further editing.
I sometimes think photographers over think things instead of trying to capture an outstanding image.
Good luck and keep on shooting until the end.

The first few months we were in Nam our whole HQ got shoehorned into one building at our next higher HQ's compound while our buildings got built. One of the general's aids was a major was the minimum height to be in the Army and with a "little man" attitude who had spent most of his career at the Pentagon. Chewing people out for not shinning their boots, undone buttons, sloppy posture or salutes etc., in a freaking combat zone! We were glad to give him exaggerated salutes etc. but evidently any VC snipers in the area thought he was more useful irritating us. We had a lot of code phrases for him. Even our Colonel didn't like him and adapted our nick names for him. On the other hand our XO (Lt Col) was a big tall drink of water with a midwestern twang whose attitude on clothing etc. in a combat zone got him the nickname "Farmer John" - he knew we called him that and made jokes about it. If you saw him coming just before you reached the distance to salute you would hear a stage whisper "If you young fools salute me and make me take my hands out of my pockets I will have your young asses on KP or shit burning detail until a week past your DROS." When we called him "Farmer John" it was with respect. With the other guy the "Sir!" became an insult. Once the Major saluted the Lt Col in the open in view of the hill side and bush outside the wire and we all got a graduate level lesson in multi-lingual cuss words that left the Major singed around the edges and not nearly so insistent on salutes after that. So if we saw him coming we would space out enough so he had a constant stream of one salute after another as a line of us went by. After a while he took to keeping his hands in his pockets and stopped harassing us over dress code etc.