greetings from the critique club:
while the subject is certainly "relaxed," i'm not sure how well this fit the "zen" challenge. people shots did not seem to do very well in this challenge.
technically, i like the crop and the expression on his face. the colors are pretty dull, however, and adding some contrast would be a good idea.
to answer your question about cloning: the best thing to do would be to select the area that you want to clone out using the lasso tool (or any other selection tool). the tone of the water is pretty even throughout the photo, so you can pick up part of the water above his arm and clone it into the area over the ruffle with little color difference. using the selection tool first will prevent the cloning tool from bleeding over into areas of the photo you don't want to remove.
hope this helps! |