Tony Bluma has been to San Francisco twice before, but he's excited about going again. "There's a lot of things I want to go back there and photograph," he explains, and that's just what you'd expect to hear from the winner of the Microsoft Windows XP Photo Contest. Bluma's Grand Prize includes seven days in the City By The Bay, so he'll have plenty of time to indulge his passion.

Bluma, a customer care representative for VoiceStream and a part-time private investigator, won the Windows XP Photo Contest with his photograph of a stream flowing past a moss covered log. Taken in July 2001 in the early afternoon in Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park, the picture resulted from a bit of serendipity. Bluma was hiking back out of the park after a morning of photography when he noticed a nearby creek. "I just happened to look to the right," he says. "I saw the log with the light coming down through the trees and shining on the stream. It just looked enchanted, like something you'd see in a dream."

Bluma shot the picture with his Canon EOS D30 digital SLR camera and a 28-135mm Canon zoom lens. He mounted the camera on a tripod and used manual exposure with a long shutter speed—2.5 seconds—because he knew that would give the flowing water a smooth, silky look. By checking his results on the D30's LCD, Bluma knew he had what he wanted after only two or three shots. That, for Bluma as well as for so many others, is the best thing about shooting digital. "You can see if the photo came out right then and there," he says. "No waiting."

It's no accident that Bluma's winning picture was taken in Rocky Mountain National Park. "I moved to Colorado to be someplace where I'd have the scenery and places to go take photographs," he says. The photography bug bit Bluma hard about three years ago when he bought a Nikon Coolpix 950 digital camera. He liked the Coolpix but soon found himself needing greater lens versatility, so he upgraded to his current EOS D30 interchangeable-lens SLR a little over a year ago. Bluma's kit includes the 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6, a Canon 70-200mm f/4.0L lens, three high capacity compact flash cards, and a 20GB Digital Wallet for storing pictures in the field. He edits his images in Adobe Photoshop and makes prints with an Epson Photo Stylus 870 inkjet printer.

An admirer of Ansel Adams, Bluma shoots a lot of landscapes and converts many of them to black and white in Photoshop. Is it, perhaps, some mystical connection with Mother Earth that draws him to shooting natural scenes?

"I think it's because landscapes don't move," he laughs. "You've got time to work with the photo and get it the way you want it."

And the results of all that careful work?

"I get about two good ones for every hundred that I take," he says wryly.

Bluma made at least half a dozen photography trips last year, many in Colorado and many with fellow photo addicts. "It's pretty intense. Sometimes we don't sleep very much. In two days, I can rack up 600 or 700 photos easily."

During his San Francisco trip, Bluma plans to spend some time shooting Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, but, with seven days to explore, he knows he'll get a chance to shoot some lesser known landmarks, too. Showing his landscape and travel photographs to friends and family can bring one of photography's great pleasures, says Bluma. "They might see [one of my] pictures and say, 'Where is that, I want to go.' That's a high for me, when I've been to a place that somebody else hasn't, but now they've looked at one of my photos and they want to go there."