one of the dozens of tiny islands in the Hawaiian Islands

aerial view of clouds forming over Gulf of Mexico

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.

looking quite similar to an xmas tree with ornaments and tinsel, this is actually a photograph of a hostile invasion possibly taking place in your own backyard. if you see a plant with a white or light-gray powdery substance on the top-side of its leaves, it is probably an invasion of the 'White Powdery Mildew Fungi'. many different types of these spores spread with the wind, rain, birds, and even the feet of insects, and when the right type of spore lands on a suitable plant, it quickly takes hold by rooting into the plant. it then steals nutrition from the plant to grow an outbreak of thread-like structures over the surface (seen as white rice-like chains in this photo) which eventually block the plant's photosynthesis process and kills it. when the mildew fungus is sufficiently mature, it develops new sets of spores (inside the brown raisin-like containers) to travel in the wind and repeat the cycle. each of the brown spore-sacks measure about 0.0014 inches in diameter which is the thickness of kitchen aluminum foil.

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.

Wind blowing across the desert is dropping in ultra-fine sand like a constant dry rain. It is gently piling up everywhere on us and our equipment, but when the sun reaches its highest point, the light illuminates the raining sand and produces these shafts of light.

this is a Maple tree photographed at night and illuminated only by an industrial-strength helium-cadmium laser (441-nanometer blue). extra care was taken to perform this unusual lighting technique in a secluded country setting due the laser beam having an effective distance of 35-miles. I'd like to note that no plants or animals (or photography assistants) were harmed in the making of this photo; although, we might have sterilized a few mosquitoes.

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).