Hi Ron,
Thanks for the go ahead on exploring your images further. This picture with a river carrying the reflections of autumn trees is one that I'd have loved to have seen in person.
I feel that there's more potential in seeing the startling color of the fall leaves and the bark of the trees, and the rich blue sky. I was not there. However, I've lived in Boston and seen the fall and crunched so many brown, gold and purple leaves under my feet, that I feel I might have seen the picture this way:
What I've done is added a curves layer with a gentle S-curve and then masked out the lower part of the picture. After that, I left and returned to use just a small amount of those changes. Then I lightened selectively regions of river reflections using the dodge tool. We have a beautiful scene of the richness of Western United States at its autumn glory. This is something celebratory and we have social customs of driving through this foliage with our friends and family to take in such wonderful sights. The whole bloom of color is for us a positive exhilarating thrilling experience when we feel at one with the cycle of nature. All we need is to see a small splash of such fall color and all the positive cultural values of "Fall" with friends getting together, wonderful drives and a hot cider with cloves and such memories come to mind. The autumn leaf is such as strong signal that this alone can be used in a fall fashion campaign to set the mood.
Then I explored B&W. Why you may ask? Well, it's simple, you cannot have the "full Monty" for real color and form at the same time. This is because the very nature of color is to influence our attention away from the directions given by shading, form and texture alone. It might seem counterintuitive to have a "Fall Scene" in B&W. How could this work without sienna, gold and red? Well let's see:
With the color removed, the river takes center stage. There is a level playing field. Nothing is more important merely because of remarkable color. Not that this maneuver can be expected to improve a picture with poor underlying form, as it will not. Let's see what we have.
We now can pay more attention to the reflections in the water and the curved path of the river and the tree in the foreground, broken, dead and signifying passage of time and maybe our own lives. This sort of thinking is not so easily allowable with the beautiful colors which seduce us from the harsher ideas embedded in this one photograph.