The Boat That Never Left

Docked, stripped, tagged, rusted. I shot close with a fisheye to exaggerate the curvature of the hull and drag the viewer across its surface. The distortion isn’t incidental—it’s structural. The lines bend to reveal scale and tension. This is graffiti over steel, corrosion under paint, void behind broken glass.

I exposed for the midtones to hold the whites in the spray and the texture in the oxidised seams. f/8 for consistent edge-to-edge sharpness, ISO 200, 1/125s. Light was flat—overcast sky softening shadows without dulling the forms. The left-to-right arc carries the frame. No central subject. Instead, accumulation. Tags, vents, cables, fractures. The dolphin up top is barely visible but critical—vestigial optimism left from another use.

The lettering is anonymous and redundant, graffiti layered over itself until legibility collapses. Focus holds across the hull. There’s depth to the broken window, but not enough to distract. Post-processing stayed minimal—clarity added for steel grain, contrast raised to separate the blacks in the paint from the natural shadows. No colour shift; the blue of the window frame and the orange rust were left as-is.

This isn’t decay as romance. It’s abandonment as process. Structure remains, but function has bled out. The boat is a wall now, a surface for messages that don’t need reading.