Click images to enlarge.

It was an amazing experience in the Hudson River tonight: That's right! I was actually standing in the Hudson River in Croton-on-Hudson, New York making pictures of the wonderful ice formations. I have lived in Croton-on-Hudson for more than 25 years, and I have never seen a sight like the one I saw tonight. I felt as though I was for in Iceland, where I lead digital photography workshops.

Helping me capture images was my new Mindshift rotation 180 ° Panorama backpack. This backpack offers a totally unique and cool design: it lets you swivel around the belt pack interior for easy access to gear that you can't, or don't want to, put down on the ground – or on the ice. I use the belt pack for lenses and filters, but it's large enough to hold another digital SLR and lenses.

What's more, the backpack is super comfortable . . . and goes well with my red coat! :-)

Click here to learn more about Mindshift backpacks.

All my gear is listed on My Gear page.

I took the opening image for this post with my Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 14mm lens. For the image below, I switched to my Canon 17-40mm lens.

The sunset image above on the left is a HDR shot that I processed in the latest version of Photomatix Pro. The photo on the right is the average exposure of my four-image HDR sequence.

Helping me find the best light, as always, was my Photo Sundial app, which works around the world.

Sure, the wide-angel photo opportunities were awesome. But as I tell my photo workshop students, try to "tell the whole story" of a location. Close-ups helps us do that.

The Hudson Valley is a wonderful location in which to shoot, anytime of the year. In the spring and fall I run a Croton-on-Hudson workshop - where I took the above photographs. Hope you can join the photo experience.

Explore the light,
Rick

P.S. I received a few emails about my boots: Muck boots.