As a jaded photojournalist, I tend to have a very skeptical eye about scenes like the one I'm about to show you.

We are often on the lookout for feature-type photos that can run in the paper without an accompanying story.

In fact our photo editors demand them.

These are needed because we run a lot of stories that don't have photographs, and this allows us to have visual elements on pages that otherwise would turn really gray with printed word after printed word.

So I'm walking out of an assignment in Kirkland and the woman I'm talking with stops, points and says, "hey, now THAT'S a great photo!"

Sure enough I look ahead and see something that makes for a great feature photo. It's unusual, visual, timely and fun.

It's so good that I look around to make sure someone's not filming a commercial or video or it's not another photo shoot.

Seems real enough so I hustle a camera up to my eye and catch ol' Santa giving a motorist some help in a mall parking lot:

(Canon EOS 1D Mark III, EF 70-200mm lens @ 130mm, ISO 400, 1/250th sec, f5.0)