Time to wrap this up.
I would like to thank all participants. Hosting the competition was more fun than I expected. I really liked to see the different interpretations of the shot. More participants would have been welcome, as I felt that there still were unused approaches. Especially in tight crop department.
dcshooter -A slight crop to consentrate more on the middle ground of the shot and lots of detail and colors drawn from the shot. Well balanced lightness on the shot. Sky could have a little more color for my taste and I would ad a some contrast locally to the trees further away.
jcomley -Intense and bold colors. Really like the look of the pathway and local darkening of the open sky works well. The strong edits have pushed the leaves in the pathway light too far.
noelcmm -Good work on removing stuff out of the shot. At least the pathway lights, dust spots and top of the tree on the right is gone. At first I thought you had cropped more, but apparently only small crop to reduce foreground on the shot. Love the sky and silhuette look, but leaves dark foreground pretty useless for the shot. Maybe there would have been room to cut more and aim for panoramic look?
todd -No crop. Also you cleaned the dust spots from the sky. Strong color in the sky and even thou you have pulled lot detail out of trees, you have managed to keep natural look to the green and good contrast.
BruceBanner -Only one with the strong crop. I like the framing of the shot and foreground looks really good. Middle ground would benefit from more contrast. Now it's a bit washed out. Also sky might have been better if you had limited the crop to the yellow part.
I'm gonna go with a shot that is farthest away from what I would do. This weeks winner and host for challenge #236 is jcomley. Congratulations.
I'll attach my view of shot here in the end. Actually 2 shots. Full 35mm shot and 300mm shot cropped to 3/4 frame as an extra tight crop option.