from the beautiful and tropical Wailea, Maui

as the snow accumulates in the high mountains, it stacks up and begins to slide down the mountain side as a glacier. as the glacier continues to get pushed from behind (from more incoming snow), it becomes packed into a very dense ice and can travel decades across the country side. sometimes they end by finally giving way to the heat, and turn into a stream of icy cold water. other times they end by crumbling into an ocean like this one.

close-up shot of the plentiful blooms on a Rainbow Shower tree in Hawaii

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.

a secluded little waterfall along the road to Hana in Maui

Having such a small body and graciously long wings, the Tiger Longwing doesn't flap quickly like most butterflies. Instead, it creates a very elegant slow-flutter to navigate through the rain-forest foliage in Brazil. It's motion is very different from what i'm accustomed to in the northern hemisphere, and i found it quite mesmerizing.

This is a close-up of Dichrolam Film - an exotic material that won awards for being one of the most innovative materials in the world. It's paper thin and made up of several hundred layers of super-thin plastics that diffract and filter light into different colours depending on the viewing angle.