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NORFOLK - Steve Flint of Foxboro is the 2015 Grand Prize Winner in Mass. Audubon's Picture This: Your Great Outdoors photo contest. Flint's image was of a short-tailed weasel gazing directly at him at Mass Audubon's Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Norfolk. "The photo both charmed and impressed the judges, and will remind all who see it that nature in all its wildness can be found close to home," Mass Audubon said.

"I have entered the contest before, but to win it is a real thrill," said Flint, 54, who works in information technology at Wheaton College in Norton. He said one of the chief attractions of nature photography is the sense of the unexpected. "I was with some other photographers at Stony Brook when one of them spotted the weasel on a stone wall," recounted Flint.

"I immediately started running down the path, with my equipment bouncing like crazy, to where I thought the weasel might end up. It saw me and started heading back toward my friend, and then...

By Ella Torres Boston Globe Correspondent December 11, 2015

Among thousands of photographs submitted for Mass Audubon’s annual statewide contest, it was the shot of a short-tailed weasel staring boldly from a tree that took home the grand prize.

Steve Flint of Foxborough captured the image of the small creature at the Mass Audubon Stony Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, a 102-acre Norfolk tract the amateur photographer knows well.

Flint, a 54-year-old information technology specialist, came to photography just seven years ago. Like so many shutterbugs, he began by snapping family photos, in his case of his girlfriend’s children in action at sporting events.

One day, as he drove by Stony Brook with his camera by his side, he decided to stop. He stepped into the sanctuary and started shooting. He’d found his passion.

Now for him, he said, “photography is a reason to go outside. And it’s a reason to walk down, or walk through, Beacon Hill...