Moody Tree

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It was foggy here yesterday morning, and I stopped to take a picture of a bare tree that always catches my eye on the trip to/from the kids' school.  I got out the tripod because the light was low and I knew I wanted to take some bracketed images.  I thought I might try to process the shot to look like my foggy tree daily from November 2010:

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but I never saw the same potential in  yesterday's tree and shots, so I started experimenting with other processing styles.

Here's the original correctly exposed shot:

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I knew when I took the shot that I was going to want to get rid of the partial tree in the upper left.  Bothers me.  Might not bother you.

Here's the HDR version straightened up a bit and with the left branch removed:

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It's OK, but it doesn't make me feel any emotion.  It looks about like any other outdoor scene I would shoot around here in the winter and pump through Photomatix.  So, I kept going.

This is the tree with a Plaster filter on it:

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I happen to really like that version, but I wasn't sure how the daily community would receive it.  I really struggled on what text, what font, and what location and shape for the text.  I was about to get really frustrated.

I decided to see if I liked what any of the filters in Color Efex Pro would do.  Here's what I call the 'blue' version:

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I love blue (and red), and the colors here really work for me.  There were about 5 filters on this in Color Efex Pro and I didn't keep track of which ones.

I wanted to try a texture, and I kept going. Here's the blue version with a texture:

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This shot didn't have a lot of negative space, but I think I like the texture with it anyway.

But then I thought I'd see what B&W looked like, and then I felt like that was the one.  It's rare for me to do a B&W conversion and feel like there's any depth to the tones of my shot.  I guess all those fancy filters and colors before the B&W conversion helped.

You can tell me which one you like best or how you think you would have set about pp'ing the photo.  I'd be interested to hear.