For many photographers, the opportunity to photograph wildlife in Africa is a pinnacle experience. For more than a century, adventurers went to Africa to track big game — and, originally, to slaughter it in great numbers. Today, hunting is banned in most parts of Africa but, for the modern-day adventurer with a camera, tracking and photographing the continent’s legendary big game is equally thrilling, and makes for a compelling adaptation of the African safari experience.

Just as the 35mm camera replaced the hunting rifle, a new technological revolution is taking place on the savannah: digital capture. Digital SLRs are beginning to equal the quality rendered by the wildlife shooter’s favored 35mm transparency films, such as Fuji Velvia and Kodak E100VS. Although film remains solidly entrenched in many wildlife...

Home & Office: Los Osos, Calif.

Stock agencies: Corbis, Getty, Photo Researchers, AgStock.

Favorite equipment: The Canon EOS 1Ds camera. Also, Singh Ray's new Vari-X neutral-density filter. "It allows a variable ND filter to 10 stops," Lepp says. "I use it for long exposures on water and where I want a long exposure to make moving people and cars disappear."

Favorite place to shoot: Mono Lake, in the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.

Website: georgelepp.com

He’s one of the best nature shooters around, but he’s more than happy to give away his secrets to the next generation. For that, PhotoMedia salute Lepp with our Photography Person of the Year award.

Even as a little boy, George Lepp got into photography in a big way. As a sixth-grader, he lugged a 4x5 Crown Graphic around, making photos, line negatives and halftones for the school newspaper. "Why they had such a sophisticated paper in a middle school, I have no idea," he said in a recent phone interview. "But it was fun, and it got me out of doing...

The world's best nature photographers will converge to raise awareness of the need for wildlife preservation.

Amid great-tailed grackles, collared peccaries and blue spiny lizards, 20 of the world's most highly accomplished professional nature photographers will trek across the Hill Country of central Texas to photograph its natural wonders during the first Images for Conservation Fund (ICF) Pro-Tour of Nature Photography in April 2006. ICF conceived the month-long competition, with anticipated prize money totaling $200,000, to ignite the nature photography industry in the service of wildlife conservation.

"What I've seen in my lifetime in being involved in conservation is that we are not winning," says ICF chairman John Martin, a board member of the North American Nature Photography Association and a longtime conservation...

James Bond has "Q." Sydney Bristow and Vaughn have Marshall. Every good field operative has a genius back at the home office who provides the really cool toys that mean the difference between the success and failure of a mission.

When you are shooting on location, whether that location is in your neighborhood or some remote, exotic destination, it's the little things that can make the difference. As Gary Voth points out in his story earlier in this issue, planning and preparation are the keys to success. Gary mentions several tools that are essential when shooting digital in the field. Two important things to deal with are power and storage.

There are still lots of places you can go where power may not be...

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.

Seattle Times Shows Courage Under Fire

It began as a tribute to the loss of American soldiers. It ended as a bitter lesson about the precarious nature of the freedoms for which those soldiers gave their lives.

On April 18, the Seattle Times ran a photo on the cover of its Sunday edition showing soldiers inside a military transport plane preparing rows of flag-draped coffins for a flight to Germany. The photo was accompanied by a story by Times staff writer Hal Bernton describing the immense care and respect that the honor guard were displaying for each of the fallen soldiers who had been killed in Iraq.

The sparkling new Seattle Public Library, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, was introduced in May to rave reviews for its innovative use of interior space and asymmetrical forms.

Here, Seattle photographer Jason Hasenbank adds to the disorienting nature of the building with an abstract photomosaic of the library's meshlike metal and glass skin. The image was made while Hasenbank was assisting architectural photographer Fred Housel in setting up a photo shoot of the new structure.

An ambitious program encourages children from around the world to share their cultural heritage with one another.

The work of photographer Phil Borges is instantly recognizable: selectively toned, medium-format portraits of people in indigenous and tribal cultures set against sweeping black-and-white landscapes. These photographs are remarkable because they clearly are collaborative works; his subjects engage the viewer with gazes so direct that the images appear to be authored just as much by...

Michael Grecco, a photographer based in Santa Monica, Calif., has completed an advertising campaign for the propane industry that features Mr. Propane, a character he helped develop. Grecco's work has appeared recently on the covers of Wired and USA Weekend, and in Time and Men's Health Best Life.