A small boat crossing a flat sea, and two rocks that have presumably been waiting a very long time for something to happen near them.
I had been photographing the rocks on their own for about twenty minutes and getting nowhere. They are handsome enough, but a photograph of two rocks in calm water is a photograph of nothing in particular. Then the boat came through and the whole frame acquired a plot.
Wait for the verb
Most seascapes are nouns. Rock, water, sky, headland. What they usually lack is a verb — something moving, something going somewhere — and a single boat supplies one at almost no cost to the composition.
It also settles the scale question, which two rocks alone cannot. You know roughly how big a boat is, so now you know how big the rocks are, and the sea between them stops being an abstraction.
That is the marina round the headland, packed tight enough that getting any single boat out must involve a certain amount of negotiation. I like it as a counterweight to the empty water — the same activity, at opposite ends of the density scale.
The light stayed this flat all morning and I stopped fighting it early, which I consider progress.
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