Sometimes you find a great photo you didn’t expect in a wonderful location. While visiting family in Pagosa Springs in 2015, I had an idea to take sunset photos on Piedra Road north of town. On one evening in particular, I raced out after the conclusion of a family event and arrived just in time to see the sun had already set. Despite the missed opportunity, I was able to capture a different kind of beauty – an ethereal blue hour shot.

Sometimes the best photos are the ones that you have to wait for. That was certainly the case when I took this shot at Blueberry Lake in Vermont. I had visited this spot before and liked it, but I had trouble finding the right composition for sunset. On this particular visit, I decided to wait and see what the sky would do once the sun had set.

South Park, Colorado is real and it’s wonderful! No, it’s not the quirky two-dimensional town you see in the Comedy Central TV show. Instead it’s a high valley, covering 1,000 square miles of grassland, and situated between the Front Range and the Mosquito Range in central Colorado. It’s here that you can often find some of the most incredible contrasts between grassy planes, mountains, and Colorado’s spectacularly changing weather.

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.

Spring in Vermont can be magical, and we were fortunate it put on a wonderful show for our trip over Memorial Day, 2019. The flowers were blooming, the grass was a lush green, and everything just felt so alive. And while it rained (a lot), I was especially fortunate to get out for some photography between the rainstorms to find this scene near Waitsfield.