Welcome to "The 2025 Calendar - A Year of Images and Stories." Throughout the year, this page will be updated monthly with a new story about the photo featured in the respective month of the Tom Burns Photography 2025 Calendar. 

If you’re reading this now, you probably have a copy of the calendar. If you purchased it, thank you. If you received it as a gift, I hope you enjoy it.

Since we haven’t reached January yet, I may as well share the story of the cover image. When a leading sports drink put up a giant “billboard” of Buffalo’s QB1, I was able to get a good angle of the advertisement of the side of the Statler.

A few days after posting the photo, a friend of mine called and said he could get me access to a different angle. I was excited because I wanted to get the image along with City Hall. That angle worked out very nicely, but the colors of dusk also allowed me to capture an image of Niagara Square and Buffalo’s iconic City Hall and the Robert H. Jackson United States Courthouse.

The image of the old and the new is interesting to me. City Hall was completed on November 10, 1931, and the Courthouse was completed 80 years later, also in the month of November. The official dedication for each came some months later.

And while Niagara Square tends to be quieter during the evening, from above there was no sense of the daily hustle that happens in the square every day.

I often say that for some images, there is a good deal of planning, and for others, they are random images – at the right place at the right time type of photo. This one was a little bit of both. There was a plan to get there, but the conditions of the evening cooperated beyond measure.

Next up of course will be a reflection from a very cold night at Niagara Falls. 

Thanks for stopping by. 

The image on the cover is available for purchase in various sizes at my Etsy shop.