I like the warmth of the B shot but in both shots I miss the crispness of the flame as in your 6/12/09 campfire shot.  I'm guessing this is the result of a longer exposure time.

terp

I like B.  I recognized that A was the original because of the distracting object in the foreground.

Now for the debate.  And as I'm getting into digital photography this is something that's going through my thoughts anyway.  My daughter and I have been enjoying doing some waterfall photography using filters to get slow shutter speeds.  My father grumps about our photos not being "real", and "not a moment in time".  I've also been experimenting with HDR the last couple of days.  For anyone who, like me a few days ago, doesn't know what HDR photography is here is a brief explanation- in photos with large differences in light it is impossible to take a single photo and correctly expose all areas.  For many years landscape photographers would use graduated neutral density filters for compositions with a straight line light/dark issue.  Actually, they still use ND filters and I'm thinking about ordering a couple. But there are programs out now that allow you to take three/ five shots or more on a tripod all at different exposures and the program then melds the best areas of all the shots into a photo in which all the areas are exposed properly.  My perception is that this is and will make for a rather large change in photography.  The photos do not look real at all yet I find them fascinating and beautiful.

So one has to ask the question of what is real?  No photography is real.  It's all a method of trying to capture the three dimensional world we see on a flat two dimensional surface.  And what we "see" is light and reflected light bouncing off objects in our world.  A photo is ink on paper (or pixels of light on a screen) attempting to recreate that scene.  So my father's argument over our photos is that the ink on the paper doesn't represent what he "sees" when he's at the waterfall.  True.  But, that doesn't mean it isn't "real".  It's just as real as the fast shutter speed photo that stops each drop of water in the air.  We don't see the waterfall that way either do we?  Well, I could go on with this but I suspect most of you lost interest several sentences back.

So, to sum up my thoughts.  I like B.  If your goal is to try to create an image that most represents what the scene looked like when you were there only you can make that call.  For the rest of us it doesn't matter at all what the scene looked like then because we weren't there.  All that matters to us is the ink on paper (or pixels on our screen).  I lean to the photography as art side.  I want the image to evoke the feelings of wilderness, bring back the smell of the smoke, the sounds of the crackling fire and wind working through the pine branches above.  If B does that for me better than A then why not?  When you were there the visual was only one of your senses taking in the moment.  If you can boost the visual a little to help folks extrapolate the rest a little better...

I think you should.

A looks green to me, B looks red. Since it's summer and under a pine, I'll go with A. Some balance between to two would be nice, warm up the A some.