Okay, here goes, total honesty in this C&C. This is how I feel about this photo.
I dunno....20- and 30- and 60-second daylight exposures to blur-out ocean waves...that's been a technique that's gained a lot of popularity now that people have easy access to Big Stopper and other deeeeeply daaaaaark neutral Density filters. I'm not really into that look of heavy ND water-blurring and cloud-blurring. I think it looks gimmicky; When I saw a 1960's era Wynn Bullock loooong-exposure ocean water shot (a semi-famous photo) done with slow B&W film and at f/90 or so (??) on 4x5 film, I was enchanted by it, but that was in 1977 and the technique was uncommon at that time. Today, it's become almost a cliche technique to slap on a heavy ND filter and shoot slow-speed ocean shots. I'm not super fond of it since it's more about the technical than the artistic.
Does this shot "work" well? I honestly think not. To me, the very closest rocks have been cropped off, and that's not good. Then we have some rocks at 40 to 50 feet distant, and then, miles and miles of empty ocean water. Exposure seems okay, and the rocks have detail and some lovely color accents on them. But it's not quite coming togerther as a flat 2-D shot the way it probably looked to to the human eye, at the time you were there.
I'm not enamored of the white balance and overal color palette either. It's not a bad shot, per se, but it is also not an outstanding shot. I think this shot suffers from too wide-angle a lens length, and a lack of substantial-in-size-and-interest and a lack of a well-revealed foreground point of interest. The rocks along the bottom of the frame would have helped this shot if they had been shown more-fully, if they had been revealed more, rather than just hinted at; the forcing of the eye to the near-mid range is not working because the near-mid rocks are just too small in the frame. I really think a better composition would have been to have focused on the NEAR rocks, and played those off of the near-mid rock grouping, and that would have showed less ocean and less sky, but would have made likely a nice composition. As-shown, maybe crop off two fingers' width of the left side and make the image BIG, and that could help somewhat.
What I see is a near-middle ground rock formation that's a bit too small, and a foreground rock grouping that'sjust hinted at, rather than shown and revealed in its beauty. I don't think this shot quite captures the essence of what was there to its full potential. I hope that doesn't sound too critical, or that it is not discouraging to you, because that's not my intent. As to the advice to make the image BIG: this shot is seen very small here; this needs to be seen BIG, to tease out the details.
