Arizona plantlife

funny-shaped sandstone monuments in Utah wilderness

With camera gear strapped to my back, I was wandering about the countryside on my trusty bike when I came across a rather nice woods. This area was new to me and the moment was begging me to explore. It was a perfect section of woods, with a variety of trees and plant life. Just hilly enough for interest and just sunny enough to get good colour saturation on film. I discovered this one tree; a tree of all trees. Its upper branches were the size of most other mature trees. Truly enormous. The times this tree must have experienced and weathered through were unimaginable. I paced around it many times as I stared up into its array of beauty; searching for just the right point of view to preserve this tree for even greater period of time.

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.

close-up shot of a young tree bud

appearing as an aerial shot over an industrial area, this is actually an extreme closeup photo of a computer chip. more specifically a 64-bit Pentium dual core processor, containing 167-million transistors. the various colours come from the studio lights reflecting off the ultra-fine details in the semiconductor material causing a diffraction-grating type effect. this entire shot captures an area of 0.0000205 square inches (tad larger than the diameter of a human hair). to capture the whole CPU at this magnification, would take nearly 8,400 photos.

well, not actually a mountain, nor made of anything hard like crystal – this is actually a very closeup shot at the edge from where a flower petal was torn. the tear left little shards of protruding flesh that when brightly lit, the whole thing glowed like an ice sculpture. this particular shard measures 0.046 inches tall (less than the thickness of a DVD) and you can see the elongated cells of white and purple that made up the flower petal.