The Hike

Woogiekids

I can't decide if this does anything for me. C&C? Just a snapshot, or something better?

catspaw

have you tried different crops? right now, the boy and horizon are nearly dead center. Try less sky or more fence and less field on the right? play with it!

ian408

I'd give it a nice horizontal crop so that the trail comes from the lower right of the image and you have equal parts sky and trail. I used the browser window to mask a little and it looked better to me like that.

Woogiekids

Both good ideas. I played around with the crops originally, but couldn't quite seem to get it to where it felt right to me. Back to cropage.

rainbow

The shot has some excellent elements in it that the cropping may improve. I actually encourage you to try cropping the bottom instead of the sky. Keeping the child centered may work and now gives the impression of ascending into the sky/future...

Woogiekids

OK, did a little work, and darkened the clouds a bit. What do you think?

Jack'll do

I really think that the tree adds to the image and prefer the first shot. If anything I would crop the sky a little less than 1/2 way down to the tree top. This would raise the boy a bit from vertical center. I like the horizontal centering of the boy. I prefer to crop the top rather than the bottom which would diminish the symbolism of the long, sometimes difficult, path we travel from childhood to maturity.

BTW I really like this image! Well done.

Woogiekids

I ended up deciding on the original as well. I just darkened the sky a bit, a bit of sky crop, and I think....think....I'm happy with it.

Thank you!

Dogdots

I'd be very happy with it. Its such a wonderful photo