You Can't Always Plan

Sometimes you can’t write it. It happen’s without any planning or foresight. I’ver got a good number of shots out in the wild which required a lot of planning, often thinking about light, times, angles, accessories such as waterproofing or of course, hiking time. This photo didn’t come about that way at all!
Sometimes you just end up in the right place at the right time. Fortune, it turns out, can favor the oblivious. 
On this occasion we’d travelled for most of the day, making our way from Anchorage, Alaska to the tiny town of Ninilcik 160 miles away on the south coast. It’s a town with only 230 families, which suffered after a huge forest fire in 2007, damaging 197 houses, thats almost all of them. It was on our radar as a location for some beach clamming and to see a historic orthodox Russian church. Having no idea where to camp we pulled in to a nice little basic camping ground, erected our little tent and got some food on the camping grill. Later however, as the cloud learned over the bay I found my mouth dropping open. 
It turned out we were camping on the coast of a famous inlet, the Cook inlet. On the far side a phenomenal structure began to appear. The sun was fading and I had almost given up hope of a good shot, when a fishing fleet began to randomly accumulate in the bay. As if purposefully framing the shot for me, one vessel began to trawl across in front of what I realized was an enormous volcano.  
I’ve searched for a lot of outdoor shots all over the states, but this one gave itself to me. If you have a chance to explore Alaska, do it, because this kinda thing happens all the time! 
The photo was taken with a 50-300mm lens, at 300mm, F6.4 and Exp 1/640.