The weather was just right for photography on that mid-December day in Madison, Wisconsin—rain, then a drop in temperature that turned everything to ice, then snow to top it off. So of course Peter Patau ventured out to take pictures in the small park around Lake Wingra. He got this image in the golden light of the late afternoon sun.

The lake is the subject of an ongoing personal project. "It has a lot of the natural beauty Madison has," Peter says. "We have some big, spectacular lakes that always get photographed with the capitol in the background, but this is a very modest, meditative little lake, very quiet, with a lot of green space around it." Peter, a writer, editor and freelance photographer, hopes the project will result in an exhibit or a book.

The picnic table picture is perfect for us, as it brings to a close on an appropriately cold note a winter issue marked by a predominance of icy images.

Peter took the photo with a COOLPIX P7000 at f/3.2, 1/273 second and ISO 100 with the camera set for program exposure and Matrix metering.

"The day I read about the camera's introduction on the Internet I did something I've never done before," Peter says. "Because it exactly met all my specs for a compact camera, I just reserved it at the local camera store, sight unseen. I picked it up about a week later."

Peter was looking for a compact that'd shoot RAW files, had image stabilization—"I do a lot of handheld night shooting"—an optical viewfinder and the pro features that'd make it his walking-around camera for the lake project.

Perfect choice, we'd say.