As you’re going to see, this entry isn’t about being in the right location at the right time with the right conditions and equipment, rather than being in the right place at the right time and working with what you've been given as fast as you can. I’ll explain…We’ve all been walking around or even driving around to see something funny, strange or witnessed the perfect conditions to take a shot, only to return with our camera to find that the moment has passed. I see this all the time, mainly with lighting conditions on a particular building with perfect clouds in the background. I return hours later and the sun has moved and the clouds are gone. A funny example of this…last year in Lincoln Park, Chicago, Clark street was under construction again. This time they were digging up the south bound side of the road and pouring in new cement. There was one point in the road that it was very tight, so cones were not visible, but safety tape was up. Someone pulled from a parking spot on the other side of the street to do a u-turn. They pulled right into the cement and the front of the car sunk down a 2 or 3 feet. I was standing about 50 feet from the scene when it happened. If I had my camera I could have got the shot of the look on their face when they saw what had happened. Now I know this is more of a headline sort of shot, or even one of those that you mail around to your friends with some clever one liner. I’d say that the shot you see above is most like this situation. I’m in Framingham, MA (just out side of Boston) and I’m driving by a frozen water reservoir after the rain about a mile from my hotel. I see that the thin layer of water on the ice has created a mirror effect. I didn’t have my camera on me, so I drove back to the hotel, picked up my camera and tripod and drove back to the location. By time I got back, it had started raining again, killing the mirror effect. I waited it out about 2 hours and the rain cleared for about 15mins. This was all the time I needed to get the shot I wanted. I pretty much ran across the street from where I was waiting, set up the tripod and took a few good shots before the sky’s opened up again.

I had to park at a dead-end road in a subdivision and walk though more than a foot of snow to reach this spot. Shot at 1/60, F-8.0, ISO 100 @32mm

Anytime I go on vacation or to a new city I take my camera equipment, no matter where it is. This part of my entry is about those moments when the right thing happens at the right location. As you can see in the snow shots below and above, a Nor’easter hit while I was visiting Framingham, MA, about a day after I took the mirrored island shots. I could see from looking out my hotel room that all the tree’s in the area were flocked with snow. I figured with all the water reservoir’s around the area that some great shots of the snow must be out there. After looking at a map, I set out to find them.

Shot at: 1/200, F-5.6, ISO 100 @80mm and cropped tighter.

After driving around for a few hours I found many places worth shooting. A few times I had to stop at a snow filled parking lot and hike into the trails to find my shots. It helped that my ride was all time 4x4, other wise this trip would have been shots of my car being pulled from the ditch by a tow-truck.

Shot at: 1/320, F-5.6, ISO 100 @58mm

Surrounded by water and every branch covered with snow, I was very lucky to be at the right location at the right time. I spent the next two days shooting the trees and trying to capture that silence the snow creates when falling from the skies. After three days, all the snow had fallen from the trees and melted.