in my opinion, the fact that this time it took less steps to get to the final shape is a good sign. The haiku should aim for immediacy. The mental and spiritual preparation can be very long, to reach the emptying of the mind and the sharpening of the perception, but once this state of preparation is reached the single haiku should arise almost spontaneously.
The result, however, is excellent!
oh thank you for that explanation! I'll try it next time. It feels a bit scary already - what if nothing comes out after all that "work"? That is how a writer friend of mine works - she immerses herself in the topic for weeks, but when she finally begins writing, she freewrites. She does not revise afterwards, other than to proofread. Her stories are brilliant: concise, deep, intricate and well-structured.
You have a great contest here. I know it has to be a lot of work, so please accept my thanks for running it. I'm learning a tremendous amount both reading others work and producing mine. Amazing. Thank you for thinking it excellent. I became unhappy with the word "harmony" after I posted. @felixgarciap and I had a conversation about it in the comments here if you'd like to see what we did with it.
I know it's particularly difficult because of the contest format.
Normally, you would pause to catch an instant of natural life that your sharpened sensibility would capture, and from here or from the memory of this moment that reappears later, you would compose a haiku.
Generally, it happens to me as I walk, I ride a bicycle, I travel by train, rarely while driving. The compositional moment lasts a few minutes and is mental. As soon as I can, I write it in a notebook, sometimes making changes, sometimes not.
In the contest, however, the inspiring event is given by the photo, and it is not said that this photo has such an immediate and strong effect on your poetic sensibility, so you have to build on it with technique, so don't worry!