cliff-edge walkway through the mountains and trees in Pennsylvania

Ka'anapali Beach is famous for it's gentle shallow waters and beautiful ocean sunsets like this one.

closely resembling a (well used) golf ball, this is actually a super closeup shot of a Zinnia's flower petal. the petals have a cool pattern of dimples each measuring about 1/1000th of an inch across. we then focused a ultra-tiny spotlight so that the shaft of light was the size of a human hair (smaller than a laser beam). as the highly focused light bled out through the relatively flat petal (see inset), it created the shading effect of a round ball.

some picture-perfect stalks of Imperial Fritillaria (lutea maxima) just waiting for someone like me to come by and capture them on film.

a straight-down shot at a wonderful assortment of summer flowers growing together

fresh young bamboo stalks growing in eastern Chinese forest

it is rare that i photograph man-made things when i'm traveling around looking for beautiful things in nature, but artistic construction like this will make it into the photo collection.

despite it's appearance, this is not a coral reef growth, nor anything under the ocean. it is actually a closeup shot within the center of a daisy. we were surprised to discover that the flower's fuzzy brown cone was made up of these finger-like structures that looked so much like something under the sea. the photo captures 0.036 x 0.054 inches (about the thickness of a DVD) of the flower's center cone.