another spectacular view of Waimea canyon. The lush vegetation and diverse soil colours make for some very nice canyon photos.

JiuZhaiGou Valley, China

Sunlight reflecting from the pond's surface, was shining up through a lily pad leaf that had grown to a few inches above the water. I loved the way it illuminated the structure of the leaf and it reminded me of modern fractal art (complex patterns generated by mathematical algorithms).

east end of Glacier National Park

this is a piece of abstract art that was created on another planet - yes, really! on the occasion that a planet blows up (usually from a massive collision), the various substrates fly off into space and sometimes find their way to earth as a meteorite. typically these are either rocky (from the planet's mantle and crust) or iron-nickel (from the core), but on very rare occasions, earth receives a piece from the in-between boundary layer where crystals have formed. this is a closeup photo of a pallasite meteorite, looking deep into the olivine crystals formed on another world. we zoomed in to view about 1/20 of an inch (about the thickness of a DVD), and used very bright and finely focused lights that illuminated every bubble and imperfection to refract an assortment of extra colours... after all, this is from another planet, so we have to make it look as other-worldly as possible.

appearing as an aerial shot over an industrial area, this is actually an extreme closeup photo of a computer chip. more specifically a 64-bit Pentium dual core processor, containing 167-million transistors. the various colours come from the studio lights reflecting off the ultra-fine details in the semiconductor material causing a diffraction-grating type effect. this entire shot captures an area of 0.0000205 square inches (tad larger than the diameter of a human hair). to capture the whole CPU at this magnification, would take nearly 8,400 photos.

edge of a corn crop in Indiana