My feelings and response in regards to these two images seem completely different and somewhat contradictory.

The first of these images is a pleasant enough scene but nothing special. I could perhaps lift the darker areas and accentuate the autumn colours of the leaves on the floor but this is how it came out of camera. My view and feeling for this image was completely drawn and consumed by a rather large leaf sihouetted in the top centre of the frame right in the brightest foggiest part. It was so stark and apparently out of place that it looked odd and I couldnt look at the picture without looking at it. I am not one who likes to change the content of an image aside from cropping but here I took the decision to clone it out and with a quick click of the spot healing tool it was gone, and imperceptably so. The resultant image I find more balanced, peaceful and at ease with itself such that now I can look around the rest of the image and see what then perhaps needs to be done with respect to post-processing it to enhance the colours and features. Whether its worth it is another questions but for some reason, that errant leaf really coloured my view of this image to the extent I felt the need to take action before I could look at it in any other way.

This second image I instantly liked. I saw it straight away, that dead wood, those vibrant greens, that V-shape, stopped and composed in square to make the image. I was really pleased with the result, always have been. I like the repeated V-shapes around the image and the sub-parallel boughs of the dead wood. Something of the contrast of the dead wood and the fresh live greens appealed, and the contrast of browns and greens. Nearly printed it out large to hang on the wall. Thought it would work well for what I had in mind.

Then one day, much later on, I noticed the silvery tones to the lower right hand side. Not knowing what these were I zoomed in to take a look and was horrified to realise……..they were car roofs! My beautiful natural woodland shot has cars parked in it! It completely ruined it for me. How could I consider this an appealing image when I’d got parked cars in it?!! It was suggested I should clone them out but I couldnt face doing it. To my mind I should have seen them there when I took the shot, but I think I was focussed on the dead boughs and their place in the composition and didnt see what was sneaking into the frame. Even cloning them out, I will know they were there and to me, that completely ruins it I think. So I havent bothered. Whether I could clone them out convincingly anyhow, is another question.

So two images with similar issues and yet completely contrasting responses to each. One having a natural feature appropriately in place but in my eyes completely grating with the composition gets cloned out and the image ‘accepted’, the other having an unnatural feature outside of the central focus of the image causes ‘rejection’ of the image on purist grounds.

Perhaps I should try cloning out the cars, living with the result for a bit and seeing how I feel. Perhaps I should just accept my response to this image and learn to look around my composition better before pressing the shutter (as is usual, this was a grab shot on a family walk that affords me little time to work the image). Either way, I thought the contrast, or rather my contrasting response (relative hypocrisy?!) to the two images, was worth exploring.