I thought it would be funny for a child, who's thoughts should be far away from things like cell phones, to have one while playing outside on an early spring day.
Setup: I put my son on the swing and gave him my phone and started shooting away.
PP: Raw converstion. Crop, punched the color and resized for web.
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Nice image - the angle of the swing works well, and the expression on the boy's face is perfect. As the commenters have picked up on already, it's really a shame that the image wasn't captured with a higher shutter speed, as it's not quite crisp enough, and as far as I can tell, the focus seems to be on the swing rather than the boy's face. This can be fixed to a certain extent in post-processing using unsharp mask, just don't overdo it, as it does show.
There are a lot of distracting elements in the photo, but unless the photo was taken from a completely different POV, I don't think there's a way to fix this - a tighter crop wouldn't really do much for the photo. It's fine to just go with it anyway - I suppose part of the point of the picture is to put the boy using the mobile phone in contract with a representation of traditional childhood (boy on phone in amongst cuddly toys would've been cute :) ). However, I would crop off the vertical wooden pillar on the left - I think the diagonals in the photo show up much more nicely without it.
In terms of post-processing: I would've increased the contract and saturation quite a lot. In order to represent childhood, you want the colours to be bright and jumping out towards the viewer. Also, running it through Neat Image would make the foreground smoother and the background more blurry (if that's something you'd desire to do).
Oh the things we put our family thru to get an interesting photo, eh? :P As for the photo, this works "ok". I wish the action was frozen with a higher shutter speed and that the boy wasn't looking at the camera. Still a fun image nonetheless. Good luck in the challenge.
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