Lofty recollections from the inventor of "height photography."

Situated 746 feet above the waters of San Francisco Bay on May 24, 1987, photographer Peter B. Kaplan was fulfilling his lifelong dream of capturing majestic images from atop one of the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge.

At the same time, however, he thought he was about to get a bird's-eye view of one of the world's greatest catastrophes.

The event was the 50th anniversary celebration of the 1.7-mile-long icon. Kaplan, who had practically invented an entire genre of photography shooting images from tall structures, which he termed "height photography" recently had been named the official photographer of the Golden Gate Bridge...

A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

Rob Kurtzman, a forensic pathologist living in Grand Junction, Colo., has been practicing for more than 20 years. But in college, "it was tough deciding between photography or going to medical school," he says.

He was introduced to photography by his cousin, and received his first camera when he was 8 years old. "It was a Kodak Hawkeye, and it used 127 rollfilm," Kurtzman remembers. "I developed my first roll of film in our basement at home using an FR developing kit. It came with a daylight developing tank, three 5x7 developing trays, a contact print box, a few chemicals, a safelight and some paper tongs for the trays. I was hooked.

From then on, it seemed that I always had a camera...

A look at a professional who reached the top of his industry before switching gears to lead a new life behind a camera lens.

One of the most successful examples of the dual-career trend is Bill Atkinson, a businessman and photographer.

"When I was 10 years old, my mother gave me a subscription to Arizona Highways magazine," Atkinson recalls. "I cut out several nature photographs and displayed them on my bedroom walls. I found that each day I viewed them, I felt nourished and inspired."

Those photographs inspired a lifelong passion for photography, even though Atkinson has had an illustrious business career.

He was one of the architects of many of Apple Computer's early software products. During the 1980s, he was the main designer for the Lisa computer, which preceded the Macintosh, and he wrote the MacPaint and QuickDraw graphics primitives on which every Macintosh system was built...

Mountain Light and the Sierra Club honor the memory of the legendary photographer with a 287-page retrospective book.

For many armchair explorers around the world, Galen Rowell has provided a unique and unadulterated glimpse of Alaska, Tibet, Yosemite, Patagonia and many other places in between. No other photographer in the last century has been as prolific and proficient in documenting his expeditions, often in some of the most inaccessible and inhospitable environments in the world.

Rowell collaborated with the Sierra Club and National Geographic on projects that took him from the peaks of the Himalayas to the wild seas surrounding Antarctica. Through his awe-inspiring photography and prose, he single-handedly raised...

A David Muench photograph seems to contain two messages. One comprises the setting, the earthly elements being featured, and the light. Then you are pulled into the scene, invited to feel the grandeur and the detail, and breathe the atmosphere. You are asked to revere the place and hear its message. This is the second communication from the photographer, a sharing of his perception and inspiration.

"What I aim for, I couldn't put it in words for a long time," Muench says with more pragmatism than modesty. "I'd rather speak through images." However, over the course of more than four decades as a working landscape photographer, with thousands of images published in a dizzying array of freelance projects, he has found a language for his inspiration...

With an inspired eye, darkroom finesse and a compelling reverence for the earth, two noted photographers skillfully create landscapes of non-reality. Both Michael Kenna and Bruce Barnbaum forge powerful visions of a black-and-white realm that our eyes never see in nature's color-saturated world. Yet, their artistry evokes depth and wonder, not illusion. Barnbaum's bold mountain scenes and Southwest canyons give viewers the sense of standing amid these magnificent landscapes, while Kenna's painterly fine-art images embrace time in a seemingly infinite moment.

Michael Kenna has photographed subjects as diverse as Waldorf School kindergarten toys, the giant heads of Easter Island and the sites of the Nazi death camps. Currently, he feels drawn to the open, snowy expanses...

Wildlife photographer Art Wolfe goes back to his artistic roots with a new book on landscapes.

Art Wolfe is adamant about two things: The environment should be high on everyone's priority list, and what he does with a camera is art - not accident. These two compatible ideas form the structure of Wolfe's upcoming book on some of the most remote and beautiful landscapes on the planet.

The book, "Edge of the Earth, Corner of the Sky" - which takes its name from an ancient Greek phrase coined when the world was thought to be flat - was meticulously shot in desert, forest, mountain, ocean and polar sites over nine years, its photos precisely paired according to color, subject, texture and format...

Galleries at REI stores: Seattle - 222 Yale Avenue North, 206-223-1944; Federal Way, Wash. - 2565 South Gateway Center Place, 253-941-4994; Denver - 1416 Platte Street, 720-855-7887.

Favorite gear: "Canon is the only 35mm I use," Wolfe says, "which was really very appropriate for most of this work because I was dealing in ephemeral moments." He also uses a Pentax 6x7, a Fuji 6x17 panoramic, a Hasselblad panoramic and a couple of Mamiyas. "I almost exclusively use tripods because I like to deliver a very tack-sharp image."

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...

The cool waters of Coyote Creek run past a cottonwood in Utah's Glen Canyon. "I first noticed this shot while backpacking down the canyon and was really drawn to the triangular lines," says the landscape photographer Jack Dykinga, the subject of this issues profile. "I had originally envisioned the tee as yellow, but hadn't turned yellow yet, so i had to comeback a few weeks later, on a three day hike to get it just right."