This dusty miller plant would look right at home as an underwater sea plant on a coral reef, but is actually a nice terrain-based plant with velvety-soft leaves.

an 80-foot waterdrop along the McKenzie River in Willamette National Forest

This large Bird-of-Paradise bloom gave me quite a challenge. I was hiking in a tropical rain-forest when i saw glimpses of this beautiful bloom. The only trouble was the best side to photograph was rather hidden by thick foliage with no practical way to get closer. I found a peek-hole through the network of leaves, but it was very high, so i stretched the tripod to it's full height and then more so by greatly decreasing it's base to obtain just enough height to peek through this hole in the foliage. Then added a very large zoom lens on top of this very unstable camera setup. After waiting some time for everything to settle down from micro-movements (including not breathing on or near the camera), i was able to capture this exotic shot.

It looked like this giant balanced rock was a hand pointing straight up into the sky. I could have wrote something real philosophical, especially since this was located in the "Garden of the Gods" but as I was standing near its base, I just hoped it wasn't time for this magnificent piece to settle.

the meter-deep water is covered with a perfect layer of duck weed appearing as a green carpet spreading through this banyan forest.

a closeup shot of an Amanita Bisporigera mushroom... more specifically the thin fleshy fins on the underside of the mushroom's top. each of the fins measure 0.0048 inches in thickness (like a typical sheet of paper). i found it interesting that the seemingly simple brown fins were speckled with millions of tiny dots arranged into clusters that made up the brown and near-white patches seen here. we made an attempt to photograph these dot patterns extra closeup (resembling the dots on a dice), but our lighting kept cooking the thin and delicate mushroom fin before a quality photograph could be obtained. we'll probably try again using a refrigeration plate or ice to keep the tiny fin fresh.

I was set up for this whitewater section of rapids and took several shots, freezing the splashes of water at different moments in time. It was an extremely wet area from all the mist, and the lens had to be wiped down between each shot. Then I continued my hike up stream, shooting along the way. At the base of the falls, it was time to change film. For an unknown reason, my camera indicated that I had rewound the film completely, but a good portion was actually still vulnerable. When I opened up the back, boy was I surprised to have just exposed my work to daylight. Having no idea which part I had just ruined, I retraced my steps and began re-shooting each scene with a different camera back in hopes to not repeat the malfunction. While in wooded areas, since many scenes are shaded by neighboring trees, I commonly will first hike unencumbered with gear to calculate the ideal time of day for that particular scene. Thankfully, my window of light for this area was long enough to obtain a second set of exposures.

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.