I love visiting Maine in the summer, especially on the coastline where I can’t get enough of the beaches, lobster rolls, and great scuba diving. One of my favorite spots is the Nubble Light, and I wanted to give it a try for a sunrise photo on a trip I took last summer. But good sunrises are driven by cloud structure, and the sunrise forecast on SunsetWX was consistently unfavorable. Then on one morning things looked a little bit better, so I chanced it.

In 2018, I did a solo backpacking trip to Quartz Lake in Colorado’s South San Juan Wilderness. When planning this trip, I had in mind three photos – a sunset, nighttime, and sunrise photo. I’ve already posted two photos from this trip before – the nighttime photo showing Mars and the Milky Way and the sunrise photo showing the surrounding ridges over Quartz Lake. This photo is the third from the series – the sunset photo taken shortly after I had arrived at the campsite.

When I lived in Colorado, I loved driving from Denver to the Rocky Mountain National Park to hike and take photos. One of my favorite spots was the Forest Canyon Overlook, which I featured in another photo I shared a while back. This overlook from the top of the spectacular Trail Ridge Road offers unparalleled views of the surrounding mountains, valleys, and tundra, making it a must see location for any landscape photographer.

Rainstorms can change a scene quickly – from dramatic, to light, to cloudy again in an instant. The weather in Vermont had been incredibly rainy on our trip, and I had already been fortunate to capture a wonderful photo of Kenyon’s Barn about 20 minutes prior during a brief moment when the sunset could peak through and create some color. After the sunset, the remaining clouds became darker and more ominous, while fog begin to rise from the wet ground. Enough light remained that I could still find some pictures, and I settled on this wonderful barn that I had passed by many times but never photographed.

Until COVID came along and disrupted global travel, I would usually take a business trip to Seattle about once per quarter. The weather in Seattle can be notoriously hit and miss, and on many of these trips I would often have trouble getting both good light and a free schedule at the same time. Frustrated after a few trips where I had brought my camera and gotten nothing, I nearly left it behind on my trip last June. But I sensed something in the weather forecast that one evening might be nice, and my calendar looked free from a distance. So I took my camera along, and nearly missed the critical time window anyway.