General feedback
I took this at a time when I was not saving my RAW files so actually have no idea what the shutterspeed, aperture or ISO were. I believe it was processed in photoshop RAW, but it may have been Lightroom. Sorry!
Hi Sarah, beautiful image and subject. I’m jealous. I’d love to photograph these someday and know it has to be incredibly hard.
A couple things stand out to me that you could do to improve the image overall. First, I’d recommend cooling the overall image down as it is a bit warm. That way you’ll get better color separation in the scene. Also, I think the composition would benefit from a 4x5 crop possibly and a vignette to bring down the bright edges at the top and pull you into the light hitting the trunk of the tree. Something like this rough edit attached. I hope that’s helpful 
@Sarah_Jane_Laubscher I also meant to clone out or darken the bright reflection in the LRC of my cropped example.
Hi Sarah, I absolutely love the light here. I initially thought of cooling the image too as it is really warm overall, but I think if you do it globally it totally kills the feel of the light and those wonderful autumn colors. Instead, I would just look at cooling/neutralizing the warmth in some of the shaded areas, maintaining that nice warm feel where light is striking. I took a copy of the image into ACR filter in PS to cool it down, and put a mask on it that was the inverse of the red channel (this way it cooled down everything but the red channel, which is a nice way to select warm light).
Another thing is, as Matt suggested, that some of the reflections in the lower right are distracting. I would darken those. I also think the very bottom of the frame is a bit extraneous and cropping some of the bottom off would bring the focus up to the wonderful main subject. (I like a 5x7 from the top down, also losing the tiniest bit of the left side to better center the already nearly-symmetrical subject).
Lastly, some of the highlights in the tree canopy up top (most notably along the upper edge of the frame) should be darkened to avoid pulling our gaze out of frame up there, and some of those bright branches up there appear to be blown out, so that would have to be controlled at the raw stage, assuming they weren’t blown in camera.
Suggested edit:
really like this image, Sarah. Love the idea of slightly cooler shadows, and a darker vignette in the top area. Well done!
Thanks J, I appreciate your feedback.
Thanks Alex, I love how you’ve edited the image. Just these subtle changes make a big difference. Let’s see if I can replicate this in Lightroom (I found the RAW file).
Dear Matt, thanks so much for your suggestions. I really appreciate it.
