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."...

A collection of searing images from photographers who came to New Orleans and the Mississippi coast from across the country to document the catastrophe and recovery of the stricken region.

They thought that they had dodged a bullet. As the winds died down on Monday, Aug. 29, the thousands of remaining New Orleanians who had weathered the storm in their homes and in shelters learned that the eye wall of Hurricane Katrina, one of the strongest storms ever to hit the United States, had shifted slightly east. While Katrina destroyed most properties on the Mississippi coast, New Orleans, at first, looked battered but safe...

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...

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...

One survivor described the wall of water as "a big black cobra" coming toward him from behind. From about a kilometer away, the man said, it looked higher than the minarets at a nearby mosque in Banda Aceh.

After being knocked off his bicycle by the 9.3-magnitude earthquake on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, the man instinctively started running with his two young kids. He hadn't even imagined that a deadly wave was coming, but he had happened to run away from the coast. The unconscious decision ended up saving their lives; after sprinting inland for about five kilometers, grabbing his childrens' arms the whole way, the water rushed past...

To Seattle photographer Nichole DeMent, the figures she depicts in her fine-art portraits are influenced as much by their environment as they are by their own personalities. These selections from two of her recent photo projects show DeMent's affinity for juxtapositions and her belief in the inner duality of the human subconscious.

Her 2003 series, "to anima, to animus," is based on the Jungian psychological theory that all people share masculine (animus) and feminine (anima) characteristics, regardless of their genders. By photographing androgynous models in contrasting red and white...

Chris Jordan's industrial ode to American consumerism.

Thousands of people pass by them every day in most major cities – auto junkyards, mountains of shipping containers, the rusted piles of relics at the end of their life cycles. Few people even notice their existence. Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan wants to change that.

These images from the half-forgotten industrial graveyards of south Seattle and Tacoma, Wash., are the beginnings of an ongoing photographic series by Jordan in which he attempts to illustrate the unintended effects of a runaway consumerist society. Rather than bludgeoning the viewer with bleak and ugly vistas of chaotic debris, Jordan finds bright colors and bold geometric patterns within the detritus, revealing a hidden and sinister beauty behind the blight...

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...

To some people, ancient myths are dusty relics from the past. To visual artist Nicole Dextras, however, they are living, breathing entities. In part of an ongoing photo series, she reinterprets various Greek myths in her newest work, often placing them in modern settings.

Dextras has always had a fascination with ancient legends and symbols. "I chose Greek mythology because it is so rich in stories," she says of her latest work. "I like to tell stories instead of being vague and obtuse, as so much contemporary photography tends to be."Shooting in various locations around her native Vancouver, British Columbia, Dextras uses models - usually friends, artists, actors and dancers — to represent gods, goddesses and other mythical characters in consciously theatrical setups.