Playing in the Cold Winter Moonlight

I was heading to bed about 1:30 a.m. this morning (night owl!) when I looked out the back door and saw the moon peeking through the big oak tree.  I couldn't resist!  So I put the camera on the tripod and set up on the back porch.  Night-time photography is tricky, and auto-focus cameras have a hard time in the dark, but I got several photos that I liked.  Then, of course, I had to play around with them on iPhoto using different editing tricks.  Here are the results:

1)  The first photo I shot, completely un-retouched.

2)  The rest of the photos were taken with the camera in this position.  All I did to this one was crop it a bit to remove the wind chimes.  It, like several of the branches, showed up red.  I finally figured out this was because of the light shining out from the house!  The four red points of light that look like a radio tower at the bottom middle of the photo are just exactly that--a radio tower on Lookout Mountain in the distance.

3)  This is the same view in Black & White mode, with the radio tower removed by retouching.

4)  This is the same view with Fade x 9 and the radio tower removed.

5)  This is the same view with the black point, white point and mid-tones adjusted to 65% to make the branches show up better (and the radio tower removed).  Unfortunately, Blogger decided it needed to enhance this photo, which made the sky lighter than I wanted it and also shows a funny blur where I removed the radio tower.

6)  So I went back to iPhoto and put everything back the way it was except for the radio tower.  This time when Blogger enhanced the photo, it turned out exactly the way I had first made it look on iPhoto!  Aha!  Foiled you, Blogger!

So, which one do you like best?