A Seattle photographer embraces imperfection and pushes the limits of her beloved $30 Holga camera.

For many photographers, their first experience with a camera is with a cheap point-and-shoot, such as an old Kodak Instamatic or a Polaroid. Once hooked, the photographer usually moves on to newer, more advanced models with greater capabilities. For others, however, first impressions are often lasting ones. Such is the case for Seattle photographer Michelle Bates. For nearly two decades, she has held a soft spot in her heart for her first camera: a $30 Holga. While she also uses today's advanced DSLRs for images that require more precision, Bates has continued using the Holga, embracing the format's many flaws and limitations.Mass-produced in China since the early 1980s, the Holga is a study in simplicity: fixed 60mm plastic lens; spring-loaded, nonadjustable shutter; medium-format 120 film; rugged aesthetic. The camera was made to take quick family portraits for the Chinese...

We present a selection of winners and finalists in Art Wolfe's International Conservation Photography Awards contest, which recognizes photographers who are committed to environmental stewardship.

Known for his passionate advocacy for the environment, nature photographer Art Wolfe created a conservation-themed photo contest in 1997 as "an event for the advancement of photography as a unique medium, capable of bringing awareness and preservation to our environment through art." This year marks the 11th anniversary of Wolfe's annual photography exhibit, which has gone through some name changes and is currently known as the International Conservation Photography Awards (ICP Awards).

The focus of the ICP Awards has been updated to reflect the new emphasis on...

Rosanne Olson's new book on female body image

Sharing innermost thoughts with others can leave one feeling exposed, vulnerable — naked, even. These feelings can be even more intense when the subject is the person's own body. But the catharsis can also make a person stronger and more confident.

This theme was made literal in a recent project by Seattle fine-art and commercial photographer Rosanne Olson. Her first book, "This Is Who I Am," released in April 2008, is a collection of black-and-white nude studies of women — none of whom are professional models — from all ages, races, body types and walks of life. Juxtaposed with each photo are the stories of each woman as they courageously discuss their bodies with unflinching honesty.

Selected winners, runners-up and other images from this year's Envirnomental Photography Invitation exhibition, presented this summer at Art Wolfe's Seattle gallery.

Known for his passionate advocacy for the environment, nature photographer Art Wolfe created a conservation-themed photo contest in 1997 as "an event for the advancement of photography as a unique medium, capable of bringing awareness and preservation to our environment through art." This year marks the 10th anniversary of Wolfe's annual photography exhibit, which has gone through some name changes and is currently known as the Environmental Photography...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...