In my orchard I planted within the last year and a half, some of the trees I purchased have very vertical scaffold branches. Are these water sprouts? When you look at the rightmost and leftmost branches (and others), they turn and go straight upwards? Do I prune these back to an outward facing bud before the branch curves upward?
Those trees look like they’re doing very well for being so young!
Those are not water sprouts, some trees tend to put on vertical growth. As for pruning, I try to minimize pruning for the first 2, maybe even 3 years. The more structure the tree has, the more energy it can make and the better it can establish.
In situations like this, I like to weigh down those branches and make them a little more horizontal. There are any number of ways to do this, but I took a bag of concrete mix, filled several old 1qt plastic pots and stuck some landscape staples into the wet mix. This makes little portable weights that have a point I can tie to.
I have seen others hang water bottle from the branches with varying amounts of water, I have seen people put a stake in the ground and tie to that. There are any number or ways to weight the branches.
Doing this allows you to really fine-tune the shape of the tree at an early age. Also, growth that is more horizontal tends to fruit earlier that vertical growth. You may need to leave the weights in place for most of the season, though. The branches won’t really hold much of their new shape until the new wood goes through lignification in late-summer/fall.