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.

This shot was taken just after we got off the ship in Phillipsburg, St. Maarten. Our ship was one of six other cruise ships which were in port that day. Modern cruise ships are huge and I was trying to capture a picture which gave some sense of their size. I think the inclusion of the fence line helps put some scale on these ships. The main reason I like this image, however, is the fact that it gives the impression (to me, at least) that the ships are beached on the sand.

My family and I just returned from a 7 day cruise in the Caribbean. This was our first cruise and I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it, but for the most part I had a great time. One of the places we visited was the island of St. Maarten/St. Martin. The island is unique in that it is controlled by two different countries, the Dutch on the St. Maarten side and the French on the St. Martin side. For the most part, however, you don’t really notice a difference as you go around the island. The biggest difference is the use of French on signage on the French side and French is spoken on the the French side. English, however, is spoken everywhere. When the cruise ship docks, you can take a water taxi to get to the downtown area of Phillipsburg, which is on the Dutch side. When we got off the water taxi we were greeted with a group of shops selling items to eager tourists. We passed by this one shop which had this interesting collection of items for sale. I got a kick out of the juxtaposition of the ‘Fuck Off’ item with the ‘Welcome’ item.

I love winter (as long as it snows) but sometimes you just need to get away for a bit. I’ll be taking a short break from my blogging activities but will return shortly. In the meantime, I figured I would post this shot that I took on a trip a couple of years ago to North Myrtle Beach, SC. This image has been sitting around waiting for me to decide to do something with it. I’ve always liked the repetition of the chairs and the warm color but I held back posting it anywhere. I just purchased the PhotoTune suite which includes Focal Point 2. I decided to try it out by slightly altering the field of focus. It’s not a big change, but I like the added blur. I also used PhotoTools to bring out just a bit more color and contrast.

One of the defining characteristics in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico are the narrow cobblestone streets which wind their way through the old city. The blue color is particularly striking, particularly in the right light. I took this shot on a recent family trip to Puerto Rico.