Tour the natural world with lawyer-turned-photographer Sean Fitzgerald.

It's a long way to go from cramming for bar exams to chasing wild game on a South Texas ranch. For environmental photographer Sean Fitzgerald, that journey took just six years, opening a new world of artistic expression he couldn't find in legal journals. Fitzgerald described how he chose his unlikely career path in a recent phone interview while hiking through a pasture on the Fennessey Ranch, near Corpus Christi, Texas. "I practiced law at a Dallas law firm for several years, but it just sucked the life right out of me," he says, with cows audibly mooing in the distance. "I wanted something to trigger the right side of my brain. I was interested in creating something tangible..."

To the trained eye, the sprawl of a city can have beauty all its own, if you know where to look.

"A place in which man has irrevocably altered the environment, and in which his works and legacy dominate."

This is the definition of "urban landscape" to Mesa, Ariz., photographer Kerrick James, who shoots nature predominantly. When cities are his subjects, his images are usually composed with one-half to three-quarters of the frame in a natural setting and the remainder focused on manmade structures.

As a general representation of the world's urban-to-rural ratio, however, James' preferred photographic balance is a bit off, according to a sobering United Nations population study...

Spring can't come soon enough for this young whitetail deer, struggling to stand on a frozen Montana lake. The effort to rescue this exhausted yearling was covered by Robin Loznak, chief photographer at the Daily Inter Lake, a newspaper in Kalispell, Mont.

Last November, Loznak heard about a deer trapped on the slick ice of nearby Middle Foy's Lake and drove out to the scene, where he saw several workers from the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department trying to get to the animal. "The ice was only about an inch thick, so no one could walk on it," Loznak explains. "It was so smooth, the deer just couldn't get his footing at all..."

At first glance, it's hard to tell what you're seeing in Adrienne Adam's images. Is it an aerial view of mountain lakes in a green field, or is it merely a leaf with holes in it? Is it a group of eroded sandstone boulders, or the leaves of a desert succulent plant?

Through Adam's experienced eye, the same recurring themes of the natural world seem to crop up in all subjects — be they mountain ranges or flower petals. "Today, I find that what really makes my heart sing...

In the year since Sept. 11, 2001, we've seen many somber images fraught with the significance of that day. As we head toward another winter of uncertainty, it's nice to be reminded of the days when art was more often created for art's sake.

This joyous sculpture, dancing amid its own solar system, was captured by stock photographer Larry Brownstein just days before the 9/11 attacks, while he was attending a week-long event known as the Burning Man Festival.

Held every year the week before Labor Day, Burning Man is a free-form gathering of the avant-garde, who create temporary artworks in the remote Black Rock Desert outside Reno, Nev. At the end of the week, an enormous wooden statue in the shape of a standing figure is burned in a ritual bonfire, the significance of which is left to each viewer to decide...

Judy Horn uses digital technology to blur the line between photograph and painting.

Some have called it "photo painting." Others have suggested "painting with photographs" or even "artography." For Tacoma, Wash., photographer Judy Horn, it's a good living.

For two decades, Horn has been making digital magic with her photos, turning them into virtual paintings with the help of computer editing and graphics programs. Along with these stylized landscapes, she has developed a healthy business creating customized portraits and restoring old and damaged photos with digital tools.

With a background in oil and watercolor painting, Horn says she finds the transition from photograph...

Charles Krebs gets up close and personal with the small things in life.

What the heck is that?

This is a common reaction when nature photographer Charles Krebs shows off one of his recent macro-lens creations. "I like to spark amazement in people," he says. "There are all these common things in front of you every day that have such great detail, and most people never see them."

In some cases, he captures these tiny dramas in the field. For instance, the iridescent beetle, at lower left, was taken in Olympic National Park, Wash., as the bug crawled along a log. Others, such as...

For some photographers, images come in an instantaneous flash. For others, like Seattle-based stock shooter Paul Conrath, the most enduring images come from a process carefully developed over time. "It’s really like a craft," he says. "The best photos are ones that are built."

This space-age timepiece follows Conrath’s metaphor in a very literal sense. Shot for a law firm representing computer chip maker Intel, the photo was the result of a collaboration between Conrath and Intel’s design firm.

"We had about three or four meetings before we even went into the studio," he says...

Part man? Part frog? You decide.

Freelance photographer Jason Millstein's image of a swimmer launching into his backstroke during a high school competition in Fort Pierce, Fla., captures the strength, speed and determination of today's young athletes. Taken in 2000, while Millstein was a staffer for the Palm Beach Post, the photo won him a National Press Photographers Association Monthly News Clip Contest award in the Sports category.

But sports photography is hardly his only specialty. Millstein's website (illumephotography.com) demonstrates his versatility as a shooter, covering such disparate topics as portraits, nature and landscapes, editorial photography, and weddings, along with various magazine photo essays.

As we head into the heady summer months, it helps to keep a little spring in your step. Dean Davis, a Spokane, Wash.-based commercial photographer, has taken such advice to extremes in this colorful image.

"Spring Man" was originally created as part of a series to illustrate a capabilities brochure for Spokane-based ICM Asset Management. Davis was hired to work with West Public Relations and a local design firm, Klundt-Hosmer Design, to provide a visual representation of a phrase used in the company's brochure: "The battle may go to the strong, and the race to the swift."

To complete the image the team envisioned, Davis set off on the literal route to find industrial-strength springs, eventually finding two specimens from Pohl Spring Works in Spokane. After consulting with a cobbler at a real bootmaking facility...