Very interesting take on the challenge. I love the composition and the idea behind it. The focus seems a little soft on the foreground, perhaps a sharper focus might draw the eye to the waldo a bit better?
As I view this photograph, I wonder, what happened to degrade the quality of this photograph as such. The composition appears to be interesting enough with the lone reflection and close crop of the edge of the water. The foliage in the foreground also adds an interesting mix of colors. Unfortunately, there is what appears to be very strong compression artifacts as evidenced by the haloing around areas of contrast. There appears to be quite a lack of fine detail...almost as if this image was cropped originally down to 300-400 pixels on the long edge and resized up to 600 pixels. The file size appears to be close to 100K which should suggest that there is enough information within. Consequently, these haloing artifacts are probably more a result of the post processing.
I think you had here a nice view and an interesting idea for this challenge. The limiting factor in this instance was the material you ended up with after the crop and post processing.
looks like a lot of jpeg artifacts.. try saving your original as an uncompressed tiff file, then do all your editing on it and then save only your final image as a jpeg.
I love the composition, colors, and the challenge is met perfectly. Maybe it would be better if it were a little less grainy (but I like thatt it's a tiny bit blury on the leaves).