About Boulder/ocean image
No, Boulder is not quite this close to the ocean. Producing this image was easy; here's how it was done.
1. Grabbed the background image that occasionally appears on www.colorado.edu from list of CU-Boulder Backstretch Photos. Used the one called old-aerial.jpg. This is an aerial photo of the CU campus and flatirons from July, 2012.
2. Grabbed a beautiful photo of the open ocean and some clouds near Salvador, Bahia, Brazil from here. This photo of the Atlantic Ocean was taken by Tiago Fioreze in July, 2008, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, which includes freedoms to adapt and share the work.
3. Imported the two photos into Microsoft PowerPoint.
4. Selected the Boulder aerial photo and used the "Remove Background" tool to remove the sky above the mountains with just a couple of clicks.
5. Dragged the Boulder aerial photo over the ocean photo and aligned.
6. Saved as Picture.
7. Cropped with Preview (on Mac).