This is my best selling photo from Cuba. Since submitting it to stock photography agencies in 2006 it has sold 98 times and made USD$35.65 so far. It almost did not get accepted at all. The original image had a great deal of speckle because it was not saved at the highest level of jpeg quality. You can see the uneven speckle patterns in the sky caused by lossy file compression.
I had to use so much noise reduction and despeckle that the image started to appear soft focused. Fortunately with this type of dreamy ideal holiday type shot a bit of soft focus does not look out of place. This image was accepted at Shutterstock and Dreamstime and can be downloaded here.
