Is this some kind of rare jewel? Or perhaps a luridly lit cave? How about a landscape from the latest fantasy video game? A computer was involved in making the image, but the subject is all too real. If this spiky terrain gives you a slightly queasy feeling, there's a reason: it's a kidney stone. Not actual size, of course, just one magnified 400 times and presented in a rainbow of false color. This image, made in 1998, is one of hundreds of specimens – animal, vegetable and mineral – shot by photographer and scientist David Scharf, a world-renowned pioneer in microscopy. For more than 30 years, Scharf, based in Los Angeles, has painstakingly documented a world that is largely unseen by the naked eye, bringing out the beauty in the grotesque.

Like most kidney stones, the one seen here is made mostly of jagged-edged calcium oxylate crystals. "You can see why they hurt so much," Scharf says. "Even at this magnification, it looks like a bunch of razor blades."...

One of the oldest surviving explorers and adventurers of the 20th century, Bradford Washburn, has published his autobiography. Now in his 90s, Washburn looks back on his multifaceted career, which includes pioneering work in aerial photography in Alaska’s mountains, 13 first ascents of Alaskan peaks and a decades-long relationship with the National Geographic Society. The autobiography also offers rare photographs and little-known anecdotes about Washburn’s World War II service and other explorations...

Water is the source of our being and the thread that ties all life together. What better medium, then, with which to illustrate a new life as it is beginning? For Puget Sound-area photographer Pete Saloutos, images of pregnancy and water were a natural fit.

"I had done a series of pregnant nudes, and I thought this might be an interesting thing to do," Saloutos says of his untitled underwater creation (top, right). A talent agency found a model who was heavily pregnant and willing to pose. "The other one was a friend she invited along for the shoot," he says.

Shot last summer, using natural outdoor light and some silver cards, the pregnant nude study was, for Saloutos, a relatively simple underwater...

Lensbabies has developed a second entry in its line of selective-focus SLR camera lenses. Lensbaby 2 and the Original Lensbaby bring one area of a photo into sharp focus, surrounded by graduated blur, glowing highlights and prismatic color distortions. Photographers can move the sharp area around the photo by bending the flexible lens tubing.

Lensbaby 2 features an f/2.0 aperture setting in addition to the original’s f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6 and f/8.0. The new Lensbaby also has a coated, high refractive index, a low-dispersion optical glass doublet, and minimal diffusion even at the f/2.0 aperture setting. Its levitating magnetic aperture system, which uses...

SanDisk Corp. has doubled the capacity of its SanDisk miniSD cards to 1 GB. MiniSD cards are used in mobile phones that have multimedia capabilities such as digital cameras, music players, games and video recording and playback.

A 1GB card makes it possible to store approximately 16 hours of MP3 songs, record up to several hours of MPEG-4 video or take more than 2,000 digital photos on a 1-megapixel mobile phone. The miniSD card includes...

Adobe Systems Inc. recently announced several new digital camera software upgrades, including the release of its Creative Suite software and a new version of Adobe Photoshop CS.

The new release, dubbed CS2, is a major upgrade to the entire suite and includes new versions of InDesign, Illustrator and GoLive, as well as two new products: Version Cue and Adobe Bridge. The Creative Suite Premium Edition includes Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, GoLive CS2, Version Cue CS2 and Acrobat 7.0.

Adobe also recently announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire...

More than 340 photographers, arts enthusiasts, volunteers and students attended Doublexposure 2005, the ninth annual fundraiser for Youth in Focus. The event, held April 8 at Consolidated Works in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, offered photography classes to at-risk teens and also included an auction that raised nearly $110,000 for the training of young photographers.

Photographer Hal Morey's famous image, "Grand Central Station, NYC circa 1930," garnered the highest bid at the auction, selling for $2,000. Morey's photo was supplied by the London-based Hulton Archive...

The Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) held its 12th annual meeting April 29 through May 1 in Seattle. Attendance was the highest in five years, with more than 140 attendees, including representatives from seven new stock libraries. At the event, member emeritus Jane Kinne was presented with PACA's first Lifetime Achievement Award for her more than 50 years of service to the industry.

Among the topics were the ever-changing stock photography landscape, discussed by James Alexander of Adobe; the pros and cons of digital picture editing, presented by a panel of stock agency experts; and searching for stock pictures in the digital era, discussed by a panel moderated by Debbie Campbell of Seattle-based Tip Top Creative. Breakout sessions covered subjects such as...

The international jury of the 48th Annual World Press Photo contest selected a color image by Indian photographer Arko Datta as World Press Photo of the Year 2004. The picture shows an Indian woman mourning the death of a relative who was killed in the Asian tsunami. Datta also received a cash prize of 10,000 euro and a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II camera. The winning photographs can be seen at worldpressphoto.nll.

The jury awarded prizes in 10 categories and selected one image as the World Press Photo. This year, the contest broke two records, the number of photographers and the number of photographs entered: 4,266 professional photographers from 123 countries entered their work, with a total number of 69,190 images. It was also the first time that the judging was completely digital.

The national board of the American Society of Picture Professionals recently met in New York City for a retreat hosted by national president Eileen Flanagan at the Corbis offices. The goals for the meeting were to determine who ASPP is, where it is going and how it intends to get there. By the end of the day, the board had drawn up an outline for many elements of the organization, including the magazine, the web site, membership, chapter programs and the educational program.

Along with the motto "Building Community among Image Professionals," the board worked on a vision statement that better reflected who the group has become over the years and where it sees itself in the industry...