Which photograph tells a more invigorated story?

They are the same three boys. It is the same pair of steps at the Berlin cathedral. Only seconds separate the scenes.  But it seems to me that these two photographs tell very different stories, just as the two nearly identical sentences I have been working through this morning would each take my new novel (only 3,000 words long at the moment) into very different directions.

In the early writing of a book, the smallest-seeming decisions both delimit and define.

It's all so fragile.  It takes so much time.