Throwing rocks in a pond

After a few days of rain a small pond formed in some open space near my house. Middle of the day but still very cold, my boys wanted to go out and see it. What do you do with a new formed pond? Throw rocks in it of course. Boys are 3 and 1.

Very cute picture although I would have like to see their faces at least. If you had shot this from their left on the side of the pond in landscape, this would have been a great image.

This is my take on the processing, I went for a retro look, so I brought the blacks down, I added some yellows, reds and green in the image, and I added some grain (just cause I like it ) and lastly I brought the saturation down a bit. Hope you like it!

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Cute shot. It has a very personal memory look to it. Perhaps not as much appeal to everyone. Your colors are a little washed out and I feel could be saturated a tad more with slight contrast added. You might try a B&W to see what you think.

Very cute! I think maybe if you were able to catch the pebble that is in mid air actually hitting the water it would bring more meaning to the picture. Regardless, it is a nice picture and moments like those, you know the ones where they are actually getting along, isn't something that happens often. I like your edit also, maybe a little more saturation like Ed suggested. Good job!

Here is another shot from the same angle with a different crop and the kids actually looking. I think this was the best of the bunch:

So I'm wondering why you didn't go on the other side of the pond and use a telephoto to get a shot of their faces with the sun shining on them. What you have here is a back lit shot of their backs. In my opinion, shooting somebody's back leads to innately uninteresting imagery. Also, it's always difficult to get a good exposure on a back lit subject unless you use a fill flash. A change in camera point of view would have been the easiest solution.

I was trying to go for some of the nice flare shots that I've seen posted around here. Harder than it looks

The other side of the pond was actually pretty far away, and mostly through mud, combined with the fact that I'd have to leave the kids by themselves at the edge of a muddy pond meant that it wasn't feasible to go to the other side.

Can I do a fill flash and still get a flare effect?

My taste is for a little darker on the blacks but thats about it.