Sunrise on the high plateau of Colorado.

southern Maui along the road to Hana

passing for an assortment of freshly mined diamonds, these rough 'gems' are actually grains of refined sugar. they are spilled upon a deep-blue CD case which gave us a nice colour backdrop and texture. the crystalline grains of sugar average around 1/60 of an inch.

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

this allium bud is just starting to initiate the blooming process and is looking quite good so far. It's still only about an inch (2-3cm) in diameter and i've got my camera gear just a few inches away to capture the minute details of this beautiful process.

this would be the coolest set of marbles around, if only they were really marbles. this is actually an extreme closeup photo of a compound eye on the Green-blue Long-legged fly (Condylostylus). these flies are much smaller than the common/plump housefly, and they serve good purpose around your garden's plants. this one had red eyes that originally appeared like rows of warm-red jelly beans with an overall dull luster. but once we pinpointed the studio's lighting into the eye's lenses, it rapidly increased the aging/deterioration process and the inner-eye elements started displaying this beautiful crackled pattern. each of these lenses measure 0.0008 inches in diameter (about the thickness of kitchen plastic wrap), and a closer look will show that some have a tiny three-hair 'grappling-hook' coming out between them.

Many northern states like Montana have an abundance of colourful stones delivered by glaciers long ago. These happen to be at the edge of a lake under a few inches of water. The entire beach area and bottom of the lake (as far as I could see) was covered in this manner and the stones just under the water provided great rich colour with minimal wave distortion. To be able to shoot straight down and not have any perspective in the stone pattern, I stood in the water and waited for the ripples to disappear before capturing this neat texture image.