Tonight at 9pm I was standing in front of the Saint Louis Art Museum in Forest Park photographing two men with leaf blowers blowing the snow off the steps and sidewalks. It was 5 degrees and snow was still coming down. My fingers were rather cold as I was shooting with my Fuji cameras and the controls on them are much harder to operate with mittens on than on my Canon cameras (they are much smaller). Both of my Fuji cameras have aluminum grips that I added to them, so when I took off my mittens for a few moments, my fingers lost a lot of heat to that supercooled metal. My toes were numb as well.

“I must be the most intrepid photographer in Saint Louis.” I thought to myself.

“Or the most stupid.” myself replied.

This was my second time in the park today, the first was about 2pm when I spent some time walking from the Grand Basin to the Boat House, dropped into the visitors center to warm up and then walked back to the Grand Basin where I had left my car. In that little walk I photographed the ice forming around the fountains in the Grand Basin, walked across part of Post Dispatch lake, caused a flock of nervous Canada Geese to burst into the air, caught a lone snow goose hanging out with the Canadas, and met Alex and Mathias, two aviation students at Saint Louis University, who were playing hockey on the pond across Lagoon Drive from the Grand Basin.

By the time I did all that, Rebecca was calling to be picked up from school and I thought I had some pretty good material for todays photos. Then it snowed. I was at Studio 858 (insert shameless plug here), the city’s largest and best equipped rental photo studio (also available for events) when Marcus called to tell me he ran my car into a curb in the snow.

“It’s snowing?” I asked.

Yep, it was snowing.