Sunken concrete ship

This is the SS Atlantus which sank off the coast of Cape May NJ in 1926 and broke apart over the years. It was shot using a big stopper. C & C appreciated

The only thing i would like differently, is more detail in the ship itself. I like the water and sky just fine.

I like the background colours but I don't feel the ship is really working. It's simply too dark, so much that it's almost a silhouette. Silhouettes work best when the shape is instantly recognisable, but in this case, it isn't. You really can't tell what it is at all - the only reason we know it's a ship is because you've said it is. Did you take any other shots with different exposures at all? I feel it's definitely a subject worth shooting, I just feel you could have done more with it than this.

Thanks for your response. Trust me if there was not a sign there no one would guess that it is/was a sunken ship. After 80 years in the water there is not much left of it. I will see if I can lighten it up to give a lille more detail.

Nice composition, by "big stopper" do you mean an ND filter? What were your settings?

Yes 10 stop ND with a 30sec exposure

This was taken at Sunset Beach in Cape May, right? I have shot there many times and you did a nice job with the ND filter and the sunset. It is hard to get any detail in the ship because as you mentioned it does not even look like a ship anymore.

I like this shot, and with a little bit of work I think it could be a wall hanger!

Tmoore, I love your edit. Can you tell me what adjustments you made in pp.

I like it, and Tmoore's edit works for me.

CHUCK A wrote in post #15029279
Tmoore, I love your edit. Can you tell me what adjustments you made in pp.

Thanks, isolated the ship and did some light painting on it, then applied a vibrance, curves and levels layer to the rest of the image and tweaked.

Finally did some selective burning around the ship to bring it out more...

Edit, also changed the crop just slightly...

jetcode wrote in post #15029844
The original edit is beautiful and this new edit is over saturated on a NEC PA241W monitor. Sometimes we pump the saturation to compensate for low DR LCD screens. It matters. As far as the photo I like everything but the shipwreck. It's a big blob and with nothing much of interest to see (no masts, decking, bow, stern, etc). It's sort of like rubble left at the beach from a demolition site. Now it may have historical significance but you have to convey that in some way I am not getting it from the image itself. The sky and light is working well in the first print.

Some may like it either way, a little less saturated:

More detail in the ship. nice composition, like the water.