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...

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...