Location: Encino, Calif. He turned his family room into an office/art studio.

Preferred shooting studios: Industria in New York and Smashbox in Los Angeles.Major awards: "I have won awards," he admits, "but since I don't enter the call for entries much, I'm not really sure what."
Advice for aspiring celebrity photographers: "Don't do the obvious," Ockenfels cautions. "Find your own voice. Being a portrait or ‘celebrity' photographer is about the opportunity and what you do with it."

Website: FrankOckenfels3.com

This image of a northern pygmy owl calling to its mate from a woodpecker hole in a quaking aspen tree took just a fraction of a second to make.

For wildlife photographer Paul Bannick, however, it took days of careful tracking, observation of avian behavior and infinite patience to capture the moment. After traipsing through the still-snowy woods last spring in the south-central Washington Cascades, he heard an owl call, so he gave a response. Then a second owl joined in.

"After that, I listened and watched, not wanting to disturb the couple," he recalls.

After observing the pair for a few days, Bannick saw a fist-size female fly into a hole made by a hairy woodpecker, indicating acceptance of the cavity as a new nest...

Location: Beverly Hills, Calif.

Popular wedding destinations: Venice and the Amalfi Coast in Italy; Mexico; The Bahamas; New York City; Napa Valley, Calif.; the south of France; Miami; and Aspen, Colo.

Accolades: Buissink has received numerous International Grand Awards for his work from the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International. In February 2007, American Photo nominated him as one of the Top 10 Wedding Photographers in the World. Kodak hired Buissink to shoot its ad campaign for the Portra film line in 2003. He was also selected in 2005 to be Apple's spokesperson for the wedding industry for the release of the Aperture suite.

Website: JoeBuissink.com

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...

Viewing this photo set, one might think that Robin Bartholick was born in the wrong century. In this world, men still wear homburgs and bowler hats. Women are still seen with petticoats and parasols. Circuses are still the greatest shows on earth.

His subjects seem about as grounded in old-fashioned reality as can be – until you notice that most of them are doing impossible things in unreal dreamscapes.

Bartholick's early-20th-century look, however, comes from cutting-edge, 21st-century technology, such as Photoshop and the Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera. Each photo is painstakingly assembled from several other images, manipulated digitally and then stitched together to create a believable tableau...

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...

A look at the winners, runners-up and honorable mentions from Art Wolfe's latest project, the Environmental Photography Invitational.

Known for his passionate advocacy for the environment, Wolfe created EPI as "an event for the advancement of photography as a unique medium, capable of bringing awareness and preservation to our environment through art."

Working with foundations, nonprofit organizations and industry-related businesses, EPI was able to award more than $10,000 in cash and merchandise to 30 different...

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...

Florian Shulz's journey to save North America's wilderness.

More than anything else, wildlife needs room — room to roam, to forage, to follow the flow of the seasons. The same can be said of Florian Schulz, a German-born nature photographer who has spent nearly half his life wandering the wilderness of North America, trying to preserve the fragile paradise around him, one photo at a time.

His cause can be summed up neatly in three characters, Y2Y, an acronym that stands for Yellowstone to Yukon, the vast, 2,000-mile long "ecoregion" stretching from the Alaska/Canada border, down the Rocky Mountains to Wyoming. Inside this region are some of the last remaining areas of pristine wilderness on the continent, mostly isolated in little islands of biodiversity amid growing suburban sprawl...