There is always a story behind a photograph and I thought it would be a fun way to look at the world of travel. So, welcome to a new feature that will appear regularly this year in the travel section. Today we are going to kick things off by looking at one of my favourite photos.

The sun is an amazing thing, it can create so many fantastic photos if you shoot it in the right way. My favourite thing to take photos of is sunrises and sunsets because they can be pretty striking and they can also create the most wonderful shots. They are also extremely pretty and can also be a signification for hope and a new dawn metaphorically. The photograph we are looking at today, I would say is one of my all time favourite photos that I have take of the sunrise and it all happened just outside Tortola, one of the British Virgin Islands, in 2013.

We were on a cruise around the Caribbean and one of the stops was Tortola, I did not know anything about the island just that it had an interesting name and that it was part of the BVI, however, like all of our entrances in to the different places that we were going, I learnt that on a cruise you have to wake up early to get the views that will blow you away. I went to Norway on a cruise in 2012 and that was the trip that taught me that important lesson as it was just beautiful.

The sun was waking up and it was another hot and sunny day in paradise and the entrance into the port was really interesting, it was made up of all these tiny little islands that you went past. The water was crystal clear and an aqua blue that you only read about in magazines and think that it is all fake and not a reality. There was this one island that we went past and the sun was rising behind it and I took this photograph.

I absolutely love this picture, I think it is because I have never seen the sun so big before and it creates this amazing depth to the picture I did not think was possible. Due to the fact that the sun is so bright, it means that the island in front is left in a shadow which is why I think it creates this really interesting juxtaposition in a image. I love the natural light flare that the sun has created and this wonderful yellow colour that absorbs the photograph.

Whenever I look at this photograph it gives me a sense of hope, I just find it a really optimistic photograph and I want to get it printed one day onto a huge canvas to put on my wall. I love the roughness of the sea as well, it is just a photo that will always make me smile.