Autumn leaves

I took this picture of leaves turning to autumn colours ( or fall colors for our friends the othe side of the pond!) Does the image work or is there too much going on - could it be cropped to give a more successful image? Any thoughts welcome.

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Did you use a flash? Kind of looks like it.

Kind of looks a little too bright to me. And this monitor always presents too dark, anyway. So if it looks too bright on THIS screen, then, yowza!

So I tried a couple of darker edits, one straightforward, another somewhat interpretive.

First edit is just with a multiplied layer.

Second edit is with the multiplied layer, flattened, then duplicated, Gaussian blurred and duplicated again. Top layer set to Soft Light, 90% opacity, middle layer set to Normal, 35% opacity.

Hope you like them.

Rad

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I hope you don't mind, but I find that your shot has a lot of potential, and I have been enjoying playing with it. Here are 2 more variations I like.

Rad

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Thanks for the comments and ideas.

I didn't use flash for this shot although light was low so I did try a version using the on-camera flash (I am using a 350D) but the result was very flat - the flash took all the depth out of the picture - I didn't have my 580ex speedlite with me and no facility to move the flash off axis.

Rad - some really interesting variations - I like the last two you posted particularly - of those two the first is my favourite but the second is also really intriguing - how did you get that effect?