KevinFRK

I can’t see any improvements to suggest, this is just to say I like the effect of an in-your-face skull dominating, but then lots of detail in the darkness (but fading out into the darkness) once you get past the skull: it may seem odd to call it out, but the metalwork beneath the chair being (just) visible is particularly satisfying.

The alternate wasn’t displaying at full resolution (I need to learn Lemmy/Alexandrite better!) so I couldn’t make proper comparisons, but the original “long” framing seems fine to me for this subject.

Glad you got a chance to retry - though sometimes the perfect shot just isn’t there.

Ah, I can now see that interpretation, and now understand why you so dislike the shadowed bit.

Perspective effects have rather doomed you here.

That said, I’m not sure there’s anything that interesting about this view - I can see why you tried a shot (it could have been an interesting view), but the result isn’t telling me a story or impressing me with its beauty. In particular, the text looks almost as if its applied by you rather than being written on the building. What do you see in the photo that appeals to you?

Interesting shot, worth the taking.

Have you tried looking at a black & white version? There’s so little colour present, it may work well.

The yacht doesn’t worry me, but I do wonder if the right hand side can be bought in a little - the cut off boat adds little, though the Stena Line Ferry(?) and tall building do seem right for the composition.

I suspect at these sort of distances you would still not blur much of the background even at F1.8 aperture - you would want to be much closer to the subject (and here, lose the composition). I’m out of my depth (Hah!) in this, but various online tools should give you the start and finish of the depth of field at this sort of distance for your lens and camera, and you obviously want things to be blurred to be a long way (proportionally) out of that range. https://www.photopills.com/articles/depth-of-field-guide might be a place to start, but there may well be better, or better suited to you.

Hopefully you took it in a RAW format, so you should have considerable freedom to mess with exposure levels and whatever histogram/levels tools or shadows/highlights sliders you have access to, without introducing artifacts in the result.