Photos Which one Portrait or Landscape?

I took these photos last month, I cropped them to remove a window frame (they were taken while leaning out of a window).

1.

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2.

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Any comments welcome.

 

I prefer the landscape one. I would crop the portrait one more so those remaining random treetop limbs in the middle/bottom edge are removed, they are distracting.

 

Thanks, I have cropped it a bit more now.

 

I like them both, but prefer the portrait crop. The portrait style crop gives the image a conveyance of vertical movement making the balloon look as though it is rising upwards into some very ominous weather, which adds a lot of drama to the image. Fix up the sun a bit and you've got yourself a compelling shot.

 

I agree about the sun, but unfortunately when I tried removing the flare I just ended up with an egg-timer shaped blob with green edges so I decided to leave it as it was.

 

landscape, I think the tree adds to it, BUT the dark portion looks like someone's thumb was blocking the shutter.

 

Did you try to duplicate the sun+rays then, on another layer, rotate 90deg. and then paste it over the existing sun+rays to make for a complete circle? It may work.

 

Yeh, it is abit dark at the top. This is the origional image


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I think it was the black clipping which caused the extra darkness but without it the image appears a bit washed out (on my screen anyway). The only other thing I did apart from cropping it was correcting the white balance.

Just tried that and it sortof works, I haven't got photoshop (too expensive even with student discount) so I was using Paint.Net and I just couldn't get the colours to match up.