Beautiful colors Brian, love the huge ships in the distance too.

Thanks for the great explanation - it makes a great photo even better. You discovered Florida's expensive time of year, all right. Even campgrounds are outrageous from Thanksgiving thru Easter.

The picture was taken in Fort Lauderdale. I've written a lengthy explanation for the motivation behind this photo in a few comments above.

Nate that must be my problem. no matter where I go or what I do i think hmmmmmmm good shot???

Ft Lauderdale? I haven't been there. I live less than 20 mi from the beach, but I think it has been 2 years since I've been to any of em (Midwesterners must think of me as odd now lol).

lol.. Romantic! haha, whenever I think of dates now I think 'wow that'd be a good shot!'

It was taken in Fort Lauderdale, specifically in Coral Springs - I was there visiting one of my work's stores with one of the other guys from my office. I'm the IT Director and was there doing some maintainance on their computer systems.

We were extremely busy the week before going to Florida and both of us overlooked booking a hotel. Since we've never had a problem in the past getting a hotel, neither of us was too worried about it. Since the rental car and plane ticket were already paid for, we figured there wasn't anything to worry about.

Of course, we didn't realise that February is a busy tourist month. We live in Utah so everything is covered in snow in February. It makes perfect sense, in hindsight, that people would want to go to Florida to escape the cold.

When we got there, we found a hotel for two of the nights, but couldn't find a hotel for less than $400 a night anywhere in a 200 mile radius.

That night, we decided to visit IHOP (Pancake restaurant) since they were the only thing we could find that was open and not a bar (neither of us wanted to drink, we wanted food) at 1am. We sipped some Pepsi and ate some pancakes and French toast until about 3am then decided that we should probably leave. It's weird being homeless, even if it is for just a day.

After we left the IHOP, we had no idea where we should go. I hadn't seen Florida's beach before, so we decided to take a look. About 3:30am now, Jeff and I stood on the beach listening to the waves crash in (My wife still makes fun of me saying how 'romantic' it must have been.)

Both of us were dog tired at this point and since we didn't have anywhere to go, we jumped in the car and found a parking lot of a nearby hotel and tried to fall asleep in a compact rental car.

2-3 hours later, the sun started to come up and since my neck was hurting from the uncomfortable car seat, we decided to go back on the beach and check out the sunrise (even more romantic as my wife would say).

This was one of the pictures taken that morning.

You really captured the beautiful colors in your photo--even in the water. Very nice.

fabulous colours.