When Jake Sims' friend grabbed his paddle-board and cast it into the icy waters of an alpine lake in the NSW back country, he knew it was a picture-perfect opportunity.
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Their weekend getaway was originally intended to be all about snowboarding, but the weather had other ideas.
Mr Sims' friend Erryn Reeder wasn't about to let their adventurous weekend go to waste, so he decided to go paddle-boarding.
"We do a lot of back-country snowboarding, but the weather blew over and came in and it was just too dangerous," Mr Sims said. "Erryn had cached a paddle-board on a sled that we went into the back country with. It's a really great place out there and it's really awesome – it's like freedom out there for me.
"As [Erryn] was walking down with it [the paddle-board], I went and grabbed my camera. Everything's quiet and all you could hear was the paddle going through the lake. It was very cool."
Mr Sims' spectacular photo is one of hundreds of entries to The Canberra Times 2016 winter photo competition.
Mr Sims, who lives in Kingston, said he loved photography and weekends away at the Snowy Mountains often provided him with fodder for his hobby.
"Adventure can be had out there no matter what you're doing," he said. "I don't think people realise how close the Snowys are to us in Canberra."
This winter in Canberra has been warm and wet, with the capital recording its second-warmest July on record.
Canberra is in store for a run of cool mornings in coming days, with temperatures forecast to reach a low of zero on Friday and minus 1 degree on both Saturday and Sunday.
The weekend will bring morning frost on both days.
Bureau of Meteorology duty forecaster Mohammed Nabi said Canberra would see partly cloudy conditions over the next week, with maximum temperatures in the low teens.
The weather is expected to warm up by the middle of next week. Minimum temperatures will hover around zero degrees and fall to sub-zero over the weekend, with light winds.
Canberra's winter is on track to be fairly "average", he says.
"Unless towards the end we get hit by something out of of the ordinary, it looks like it's going to be a pretty fair ride from here on."
With only weeks left until the end of winter, time is also running out for people to enter The Canberra Times 2016 winter photo competition, which closes on August 31.
Photographers are invited to send in their best winter photos for the chance to win $1000 of prizes and have their work published.
To enter, send a maximum of three photos to photocomp@canberratimes.com.au as attached JPEG files, and include your name, address, phone number, photo title, a description of the photo and the date it was taken.
Photos must be at least 150 kilobytes and should not carry a watermark. Full terms and conditions are available at www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/competitions.
