This is a beautiful little town in the Austrian Alps, fairly close to Salzburg. It’s a World Heritage Site because salt has been mined here since 1,200 B.C., but also because of its natural beauty. The town is built on the shore of the Hallstätter See, and that shore is a mountain. We were there for their first snow of the year (it just hit the top of the mountains — you can see it in this photo), and it rained most of the time. This was too bad since we planned on doing a few hikes around the lake and into the mountains (there’s also a huge platform extending out from the top of a nearby peak — I was looking forward to that).
I had been out earlier in the morning (for several hours) taking photos, which was basically to screw around with my camera since the clouds were completely overcast and it was still raining. I had also been out there the previous mornings. The clouds didn’t split until I was sitting down to breakfast with Sarah (wife) and Lucia (11 month old daughter), an hour before we were scheduled to leave for Prague. Photographers will gladly go without food simply because of sublime lighting conditions.