I screwed up. I last used my camera to document a roof leak in our Condo, so it was set to "basic" JPG. Last night at our party for 4th of July, and several glasses of wine, I was too lazy to set up the tripod, and forgot to set the Nikon D800E back to RAW, which I always use. I used a Tamron 24-70 f2.8 VC lens at 40mm, ISO 800, 1/25 sec at f5.6 and the second image at f6.3, hand held with lens VC set to "ON". Since I could not correct exposures etc when developing the RAW images, for the first shot shown, I made three copies, then used levels to tame the highlights on one exposure, the second saved image I used levels to open the shadows, and the third saved copy I used as-is. I combined the three images in Photomatix Pro.
Thanks for looking
Dave in Beach Haven, NJ