Hillside at Appleton Farms (Posterized)

I am planning to start another landscape painting next week, so I have been looking through my photos to choose what I want to paint. In October, we took a tour of Appleton Farms (in Ipswich, MA) and I took some pictures. I liked this view of a tree on a hillside. Even when I took the photograph, I thought I would like to paint the scene. (I posted the original photograph here on October 30 -- and then transformed it into a Halloween scene on the 31st.) So yesterday I returned to the Appleton Farms photo to get it ready for use as a reference painting. I lightened up the shadows, and posterized the image. The original photo was rectangular and I cropped it to get a square format, then printed it out. But I wasn't quite happy with the composition, but I had an idea for modifying it. Instead of working it out through trial and error on the canvas, I decided to try out my idea in a digital version. To be continued. . . .