Last Christmas, my family and I took a Caribbean cruise which included a stop on St. Martaan. The island has a new port area designed to hold the numerous cruise ships which visit the island. I believe when we visited there must have been 5 or 6 ships in port. From the port area you can take a water taxi in to the main town. When you get off of the taxi you are immediately confronted with all sorts of things to buy. I took this picture of a small shop because I really liked the look of the candy advertisements agains the bright yellow siding of the building. There is no ‘before’ picture this time because this image came straight out of the camera.

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.