I never promised you a rose garden

[stamper]

Sung by the late Lynn Anderson.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lynn-anderson-dead-dies-20150731

 Is the light patch behind the railings a distraction? It catches the eye but it would be difficult to remove.

[francois]

Beautiful… It's as simple as that. The light area doesn't bother me at all. It catches the eyes for a split second and then it's forgotten.
Bravo!

[Eric Myrvaagnes]

I agree with Francois.

However, if it bothers you, I suspect the easiest way to fix it would be to do some careful PS cloning from the fence that is all dark. It might take an hour of fiddling to get it right. Would it be worth it?
If it were my image, I might try for ten minutes max.

I love the way you manage to catch subtle body language at just the right instant, with your people always in just the optimum position in the composition.

[Arlen]

I find it to be very striking, Robert. Your high contrast images are always interesting.

I don't think the light patch behind the railings is anything to worry much about. But it's easy to tone it down into obscurity in Lightroom if it bothers you. I just did it in 5 minutes by using the adjustment brush set at auto mask to select it; erase brush at auto mask to quickly remove some parts of the rails that had also been selected; then a combination of negative highlights, whites and exposure to pull it down into the darker background.

[RSL]

Fine shot, Robert. Don't know about the title. That song must win the overall, all-time prize for the number of cliche's it managed to pack in. "You better look before you leap; still water runs deep. . .," and on and on. Lynn Anderson had a great voice, but, holy smoke, Andy.

[stamper]

Thanks for the suggestions. I thought about cropping out the railings but imo it cut off the top of the shadow too much. Regarding the song, it is one of my favourites and most songs are cliche's? I thought that the plants looked like weeds and her looking at them meant she might have been disappointed therefore the reason for the title. This was a grab shot that I saw out of the corner of my eye as she entered the light patch. As to the darkness of the figure then she was that dark when I took the image.