When I first saw these celosia flowers in China, I couldn't resist taking the time to find one with just the right form and available light to capture a couple shots.

I'm climbing down inside a volcano crater and am amazed with the variety of rock/soil colours that are so neatly piled about.

vertical blade-like mounds of sandstone in eastern Utah

two female bears resting on a sandbar in the middle of a lake (Aleutian Islands).

It is slow and tiresome hiking through miles of these steep rows of sandstone walls. it's a very beautiful location, speckled with small trees and interesting formations, but relentless with it's heat and giant maze-like features. most of my time is used climbing up & down (and winding to & fro) than actual forward progress (if forward is even a possible direction).

home grown soda bottles? well, not quite. laying across the bottom of the photo is the edge of a daisy's stem, and the 'bottle' is a single hair/fuzz (1/60 of an inch in height) protruding from that stem. daisy plants have bristly stems (in between soft and prickly) so the fuzz has a larger diameter making it more stiff, and as we recently discovered... it's also hollow and uniquely shaped. to add a little colour, we placed a small piece of yellow tractor-feed paper as a background, so that the out-of-focus hole created a nice glow on the horizon.

Bamboo gate in Japanese garden

Another beautiful and large butterfly in Malaysia. It's wings are simply huge when they flap by. They're relatively common as long as you don't mind being perched motionless in the middle of a flower bed and waiting for one to land in front of the lens. They are more properly called a Ricepaper butterfly, but most locals know it as a Tree Nymph.