San Francisco is a city built on an active fault zone and is famous for having a decidedly off-kilter subculture. It’s only natural, then, that the city’s unstable beauty should be captured perfectly by a jiggly dessert. Bay Area artist and photographer Liz Hickok may have cornered the market on a truly unique artistic pursuit: gelatin sculpting. Always interested in maps and models, Hickok set about building a scale model of the city three years ago, while she was pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. After experimenting with various media to form buildings, she found them all either too difficult or too expensive.

"I’m a bit of a 'foodie' and love sweets,” she says. "And I’ve always been attracted to color and light, so I sort of stumbled on the idea of Jell-O...

Spring is definitely in the air for this happy couple. Their costumes may seem unusual, but their eternal, happy pursuit is universally recognizable. This image, by Portland, Ore., photographer Andy Batt, was made for the Oregon Ballet Theatre (OBT) to promote the troupe's fall 2005 performance of the ballet "Angelo,” by choreographer Julia Adam.

The ballet, an interpretation of the famous "All the world's a stage” soliloquy from Shakespeare's "As You Like It,” depicts seven stages of a man's life. In this OBT production, all of the life stages were designed around the same set piece: the trunk of a tree.

To capture the feeling of the drama, Batt chose to shoot the dancers outdoors, using a real tree at Council Crest Park, just west of Portland...

After several articles about the overheated antics and egos of studio shoots, we thought we'd end this issue with an idyllic scene of natural splendor: Claire Curran's "Maple Leaves in Workman Creek," shot in Arizona's rugged Sierra Ancha Mountains.
"Actually, it's one of the filthiest creeks I've ever seen," Curran says. "Each time I go there, I have to do a major sweep of all the beer cans and plastic bags lying around."
So much for idyll...

What do you get when you mix together a group of modern ballet dancers, a barren landscape and a freelance photographer who doesn't take himself too seriously? If that photographer is the itinerant Albert Normandin, the answer is "Jump," an image that sums up his kinetic style and love of spontaneity.

The shot was taken in August 2000 ("It seems like so long ago," Normandin says) outside of Las Vegas. "We just went out to the desert, and I let them jump around and shot about 150 rolls," he says. "I like to work that way, just let them go with it...

Though looks can't kill, this one just might. It's a close-up of the eye of Arothron mappa, also known as the scribbled pufferfish. It's hardly a man-eater, but don't try to turn it into sushi: Its flesh contains a neurotoxin that can be deadly.

The image was shot at night by photographer Murray S. Kaufman, while the pufferfish was dozing in a reef in the Sulawesi Sea. Diving off Mabul Island, near the southeast coast of Malaysian Borneo, Kaufman noticed the fish because it was a juvenile and, therefore, more colorful than the adult kind. "I got about a foot away from it when I snapped the picture," he says. "Usually you get one strobe shot and they take off, but I was able to get a few images."...

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."...

Nothing heralds the advent of spring like a romp through a sunlit front yard. "Hula Hoop Dancing," by freelance photographer Manuello Paganelli, captures the joyful anticipation of the warm days to come. The idea for the image came spontaneously during a shoot for a Vespa scooter ad near Paganelli's home in North Hollywood, Calif. While taking a break from photographing a model in various poses on a scooter, one of his assistants suggested that Paganelli experiment with some of the playful props they had brought to the shoot, including a number of colorful hula hoops. As the model struggled to smile at the camera and keep all the hoops spinning at once, Paganelli started photographing with his Mamiya RZ67 and 90mm lens, using reflectors to enhance the available early-morning light...

Winter has a way of transforming even the most recognizable places into fairy-tale fantasies almost overnight. Just turn down the temperature a few degrees and the lush greenery of Oregon's famous Multnomah Falls suddenly resembles a scene out of Norse mythology. Photographer Janis Miglavs captured this frosty image with his medium-format Mamiya 645 camera, using Provia 100 film, during an unusually cold winter in the Portland area. "This is one of the most visited, most photographed tourist spots in the whole state of Oregon," he says. "But on that day, I was the only one around. I never saw any footprints. It was just this wonderland of snow and ice."

Miglavs is a well known adventure travel photographer who has seen some of the most exotic lands on the planet...

The sparkling new Seattle Public Library, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, was introduced in May to rave reviews for its innovative use of interior space and asymmetrical forms.

Here, Seattle photographer Jason Hasenbank adds to the disorienting nature of the building with an abstract photomosaic of the library's meshlike metal and glass skin. The image was made while Hasenbank was assisting architectural photographer Fred Housel in setting up a photo shoot of the new structure.

Ever feel like you have one too many balls in the air? How about too many office supplies? That's the mood captured here in "Balancing," by photography student Sheila Menezes.

The image won first prize in the College & University — Computer-Assisted category of the Photo Imaging Education Association's (PIEA) 2004 International Student-Teacher Photo Exhibition and Competition in January.

Menezes, a graduate student at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif., says that the title of the photo also describes the balance of her two favorite genres of photography, portraiture and still life. "It's one of my favorite images, but I find it so ironic that I won the prize with it," she admits...