Hi Leigh,
Photography can be challenging for new photographers. There are a lot of things to learn and no two situations are the same. Photography can be a bit like playing poker in that you have to make the best of the hand you are dealt!There are days when you are never going to get all the aces, but then there are other days when “pairs” will win the day.
In this instance you are working with pairs. You have a pair of hay bales, two bales in front of the tractor, two power poles on the horizon and, if you do some cropping you can also have two trees. Equal numbers of anything in a photograph can create symmetry and this is good.
I have just proposed cropping the sides of the image to remove some of those trees but I would also crop some of the foreground and the sky as well. Most of the focus in this image is along the centre of the frame, so we do not need too much foreground or sky to understand what is going on.
Now, you might notice in the example below that I have converted the image to black and white and added a hint of sepia. There are times when a photo simply has too many clashing colours and I think that's the case with your image. The bluish sky, along with the dark green hill and the brown foreground are not really working together. By converting the image to black and white you can remove the colour clashes and concentrate on the different design elements in the picture instead.
I started off adjusting the image in Photoshop (mainly to do the crop and clone out some distracting elements) but then I used a plug-in called Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 to convert the file to black and white. Between the two applications I then darkened and added contrast to the sky and then I selectively went about brightening some parts of the picture, while darkening others, including the border.
Now, one thing that most people are shy about when they get into photography is exploring new ideas. Every time you open a photograph in Photoshop, your first step should be to save it with a new name. That way you can experiment as much as you like without worrying about losing the original file. Like anything, the more you practise, the better you will get.
Cheers,
Anthony
Four Seasons – Image Doctor's Edited Version