Irrigation

@DavidTriplett: IMHO,your 'where I'm at' image looks great! I'm not sure whether this is relevant but in my my very limited experience, there comes a point where continuing to 'tweak' an image does more harm than good. If your PP'd image expresses what you (visually) had in mind when taking the shot, I'd leave it that for now. Other variations (B&W, toned, etc.) might be interesting to consider but your color image (crop, levels, contrast) form the basis for these. BTW, I still like this photo a lot! I'm a big fan of Michael Freeman's books on photography. I suspect that he might well have selected this photo as a good example of a 'Photographer's 'Eye

Mike

If it were me (using PS Elements 15), I'd use the clone stamp tool to copy the sun to a another layer, this eliminating it from the original, and then copying it to the original.

Michael, your idea has merit as a concept, but I'm not aware or don't have the skills to pull it off successfully. The bright light in that upper-right corner has blown out the background details. Certainly I could use a number of techniques to create a bright sun zone at any location, but I don't know how to recover the details needed to keep that upper right corner an effective component of the composition. If you have any ideas, please share. Thanks for all the feedback.

I suspect that he might well have selected this photo as a good example of a 'Photographer's 'Eye

I'm very flattered. Thank you. Since I'm an Architect by profession, I really appreciate Freeman's point about "designing" a photograph. It makes perfect sense to me.

All: Any further thoughts on the pros and cons of my bug-zapping? Thanks in advance.

keep the bugs or not?

Depends if your goal is to win the competition and play to an audience that gives your work “a cursory look.”

These are decisions one has to make on a case-by-case basis, depending on the importance of the competition. There would be times it would be important enough and the change to a photo to accommodate superficial viewing would be worth any trade-off. There would be other times when I might not even care to win a competition where judges couldn’t be counted on to take the time and care to notice subtleties.

It all depends.

In general, my approach, since I want my photos to express my vision, is to want a photo to look the way I want it to look and work with subtleties as best I can by being both subjective and objective about it. An actor and director know that a stage whisper, for example, has to be soft enough for an audience to recognize it as a whisper but loud enough to be heard in the balcony. It’s a good place to consider the audience. But the last thing the actor is going to want to do is turn a whisper into a shout to make sure everyone hears it perfectly without having to take the effort sometimes required when watching a sophisticated play.