You have found a great location and a great old car to photograph and you have chosen a good time of day for making it all happen but sadly the thing that lets this image down for me is the lens flare, particularly that big green hexagon near the bottom-left of the frame.
Usually we try and avoid flare by using lens hoods but when the sun is positioned like this in the picture a lens hood will not help you. The next option is to remove any extra elements of glass on the lens that you might not need. In this case it might be a UV or polarising filter, anything that might cause internal reflections in the lens. The final thing to check is that the lens is as clean as possible. (Here, you may have had a slight smudge on the lens.)
To improve this image you can to start by cloning out the green flare over the left-hand bumper and on the ground below it. This might take some time but it will be worth it. When you come to the ground below the bumper select the patch of green, then go to the Channels Mixer, choose the Green Output Channel and then pull back the Green slider to about -53. From there you can flatten the image and have a better starting point to work from in removing the rest of that green.
Finally I would get busy with the Burn Tool to add some more light and shade into the engine compartment. Choose the Burn Tool, select Range: Shadows (in the Tool Options bar) and then start to darken all those “wish I was black” murky areas in the central part of the picture.
Now, one last thought. You used a rather extreme wide-angle lens in making this photo but I actually feel it might have looked just as good if you pulled back about a metre and then narrowed the field of view.
This would have resulted in less clutter and focussed our attention on the key elements – namely the car and sky.
Remember – shoot then move, shoot then move!
Image Doctor's edited version
Photographer's comments: I took this shot while away working. The sunset was a bonus. For me, the "for sale" and "livin the dream" on the front of the old wreck yelled "character". I took the image on my Nikon D90 using a three-shot HDR setting, then put it through CS4 and Photomatix. – Greg King
Article first published in Digital Photography + Design, August-September 2011.