The serenity of the deep woods

This little image is one of my favorites from this year.  It's nothing spectacular, no great mountain or ocean vistas, but it comes close to conveying the "feel" of the scene.  A single image is at best a poor way to experience nature.  There is so much information that's lost.  The sound of the water cascading over the rocks, the soft breeze moving the leaves, the slight damp mist in the air; none of that is accurately translated in a photograph.  As a landscape photographer you do the best you can.  The images you share with others are the ones that bring back memories. 

Hopefully, once in awhile you capture an image that provides the viewer with just a tiny bit of that peaceful and serene feeling of being in the deep woods, listening to the sounds and marveling at the way nature has organized this little piece of the universe.

I shot this scene twice, from the same location and using the same settings.  The first one is the more conventional.   The second one was just composed the slightest bit differently.  It shows the rock in the immediate foreground and as a consequence less of the backgroud.  I like them both, and find it hard to choose.

They are also cropped a bit differently.  Both taken at 12mm with the super wide Tokina 11-16, the natural tendency is to crop in the wide landscape format.  As I mature as a photographer, my process is changing.  Now I often sit on an image for some time, try a few different ways of cropping and processing the image, before settling on the final capture to share with my friends.  In this particular case going with the conventional wide landscape crop didn't seem to work as well.  The wide lens did enable me to get quite close which was an advantage.  When the shutter was clicked my butt was on a fairly uncomfortable rock, and my feet were braced on the light colored rock in the foreground, just an inch or two out of the frame.  The images were taken a little over two minutes apart, so the light is just slightly different. 

So which one is the better representation of the scene?  I guess I'm to close, I can't decide.  I'll leave the decision up to you.