I love Pagosa Springs, and on one visit in December, 2011 I decided to try taking photos of the night sky using a rented 24mm f/1.4 lens. This was the first time I had taken night photos, so I learned a lot of valuable lessons on this trip. The biggest: finding a shot at night is much harder than finding one during the day.

The Lincoln Brook stretches from the top of Vermont’s Lincoln Peak and runs all the way down to the Mad River near Warren, Vermont. Towards the bottom of the brook, there is a breathtaking series of waterfalls along a short but popular walking trail. The falls themselves ebb and flow with the seasons, sometimes running heavily and sometimes drying to a trickle. On this particular visit, they were running at full flow after a torrential rainstorm had passed through the area a few days prior.

Forest Canyon Overlook is one of my favorite places to photograph at Rocky Mountain National Park because there are amazing views in nearly every direction. Depending on the weather, color, and light – you can find a new photo almost every time you visit. On this particular trip I was taking photos of the wildflowers and the sunset, when I saw a group of people hanging out on the rocks at the end of the overlook.

This is one of the older unpublished photos in my archives, taken all the way back in October, 2014 on a trip to Aspen and Snowmass. The weather was intermittently gray and sunny, and this was one of those photographic moments where the two came together into something sort of spectacular. The problem was, the scenery never quite gelled in a coherent way, and I was left with a potentially good photo that never really worked. Thankfully, all I had to do was wait, and technology came to the rescue.

When traveling with your camera, it often helps to know the phase of the moon. That said, if you’re not a walking moon phase calendar, simply paying attention to your surroundings can be a good fallback. Such was the case for me one night before I took this photo when I happened to look out the windows of the Google office and see an almost full moon rising over downtown. I immediately opened PhotoPills, saw that the full moon was the next night, and began formulating a plan.