Is pretty enough?

We were sitting on a bench across the Pond from the boathouse. The sun was low in the sky and the clouds were claiming the late afternoon. Kati noticed that the boathouse with the steeple right behind it and their reflections took on the appearance of a mandala. I took half a dozen shots to capture that.

When I got home, I worked on that image, brightening the boathouse and the steeple behind it. That strategy is risky - all too easy to overdo it and my version suffered from that flaw. I tried another version that was heavily cropped so that there was no distraction from the mandala that we saw. Quite an extreme crop and the image lost some of its sharpness, a problem.

This image worked best of the 3 or 4 workups I tried. But as I look at it now, I’m not sure someone viewing it would notice the mandala that we found so compelling. Is it just a pretty picture of that lovely boathouse? And if so, is that enough? Does it need to have more going on for it?

I remain unsure. It takes me a few weeks to know which images are strong, which just momentary favorites. I’m going to check back in a week or 2. In the meantime, let me know what you think in the comments below.