It’s spring break time and unfortunately I’ll be stuck in Michigan with our wonderful early spring weather. However, I have my old photographs to warm me up including this one taken on a spring break a couple of years ago in North Myrtle Beach, S.C. Unlike yesterday’s image taken at the same location, today’s image is a bit more cheery.

Browsing through my Lightroom catalog this morning I came across this shot I took in North Myrtle Beach, SC in 2008. What caught my eye was the fog layer in this shot and I was suddenly inspired to work on this image. The thing I like most about this image is the way the new building is seen rising above the fog. The murky nature of the weather combined with the construction in the background made me think of a more industrial scene rather than a beach scene. As such, I processed the image to increase the murkiness.

Here’s something different, an image in color! I’ve had this post sitting in draft stage for some time and I finally decided to publish it. No reason for the delay, it just got ignored for some reason. The picture was taken while my family was on on vacation in Puerto Rico last year. It shows one of the two forts in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico known as ‘El Morro’ officially named ‘Fort San Felipe del Morro’ When I took the shot there was a boy sitting on the grass and I thought he added a bit of interest to the shot. Unfortunately I think he’s a bit too small to really have much impact on the picture, particularly in a smaller image.

This shot was taken in St. Thomas, USVI on a recent trip. One of the things I was hoping to find was some brightly color boat which would make for an interesting picture. Didn’t find any of those. Instead, what I got was this gritty looking thing. The light was pretty bright and flat but I decided to take the shot anyway just for fun. When I looked through the days shots I wasn’t thrilled with what I had taken, so I decided to work on images that I liked better. After making another pass through those shots I decided to see what could be done with this image. I liked the gritty texture of the boat, especially the way the paint is all chipped and faded. I thought it might be nice to try adding some additional texture to the image through some image overlays.

I took this shot as we walked through one of the alleyways. I liked the strong light on the sign and the shadow it cast on the wall. I also liked the way the sun brought out the texture of the wall. For some reason when I took the shot I decided to shoot it wide. I had a 28-300mm lens on my camera and this shot was taken at 40mm. When I was processing it, however, I decided that the wide shot didn’t really capture the intent that I had when I took it. I was drawn to the signage and the shadows and the wide angle shot didn’t work. In processing, I reworked the crop to focus more on the sign and its shadow.

The island of St. Maarten/St. Martin is an interesting place. Half the island is Dutch, half is French. While visiting there my wife and I took a bus tour around the island which started in Phillipsburg on the Dutch side, and travelled to Marigot, the capital of the French side, and back again. Travel between the two sides is seamless, no more complicated than traveling from one state to another in the US. This shot was taken in an open air market near the waterfront in the town of Marigot. The woman who was running the booth had a large collection of herbs and spices in these bags. It was getting later in the day and I think she was starting to pack up by taking the signs out of the bags which identified the contents. I managed to get this shot before she took these out.

is is another picture I took while on my Caribbean cruise. This is a shot taken in ‘Casino Royale’, the casino on board the Freedom of the Seas. I’m not much of a gambler, although I did play a little video poker while waiting for dinner time and actually ended up ahead by a few dollars. This shot was taken with my new Sigma 15mm fisheye and it shows one of the banks of video poker games in the casino. I thought fisheye might make for an interesting shot.

This image shows the entrance to the Arcadia Theater. I really liked the color and deco design elements of this theater. Taking pictures on the ship was a challenge for me. There were so many bright surfaces and so many lights the final images just seemed to come out too busy. I tried a couple different attempts at processing this image and at some point I decided to try using Topaz Simplify just to eliminate some of the extraneous reflections and focus more on the color and design elements of the theater entrance.

This picture was taken from the deck of my ship on a recent cruise to the Caribbean. Not much in the way of foreground to make the shot interesting, but I did like the way the sun was lighting the clouds. This image is actually a closer crop from the original. I used my longest lens at 300mm, but the sun was still too small to my liking. I cropped in closer and slightly darkened the exposure to get some more color and a better feeling of sunset light.

When we arrived at Phillipsburg, St. Maarten I saw a sign somewhere claming that the island was the happiest island on Earth. When I saw this sign, I understood why.