Hi Roger,
Many photographers fail to get the most from their lenses. Most assume that if there is a lot to get into the scene then you use a wide-angle lens, and if the subject is far away you use a telephoto lens.
What good photographers do however, is use a combination of lenses and positions to create strong photos.
In this photograph here I cannot help but notice the birds flying above the surf line; the problem is that the birds appear very small. To make the birds appear bigger in the picture you could easily change over to a telephoto lens… the problem with doing this from the position you were in when you made this photo though, is that the boat would no longer fit into the picture.
This is where you need to get clever. In an instance like this, I would be inclined to walk away from the boat at least a good 10 metres… then I would put on the telephoto lens and recompose the picture. What you will discover is that the foreground (the boat, anchor and net) will be compressed against the sea and those birds in the background. I think this would have made the photograph stronger.
Perhaps the only other thing I would have do would be to pull the bow of the boat about just enough so that the sunlight was capturing some of the colour.
Now, one thing that you can do this photograph is simply to crop some of the sky away. This will help maintain some presence for the birds.
In the example below I have cropped the sky I have also dropped the image into Nik software HDR Efex Pro.
Image Doctor's edited version
