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...

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.

A selection of images from PIEA's 2004 International Student-Teacher Photo Competition.

The top student photographs from around the world were lauded recently in the Photo Imaging Education Association's (PIEA) 2004 International Student-Teacher Photo Exhibition and Competition.

In January, the judges for the PIEA competition chose 120 images from more than 4,200 entries sent in by 105 schools from the United States and six other countries. The chosen photos were exhibited at the...

It's hard enough to be a nature photographer — slogging through jungles and enduring the burning desert sun to set up just the right shot of a rare creature. But just imagine doing it all on a half-hour air supply. That's what underwater wildlife photographers like Geoffrey Semorile must do to produce these crisp, brightly colored images of the other three-quarters of the world hidden beneath the sea.

"All underwater creatures know three things about underwater photographers - when you are out of film, when you are in focus and when you are out of air," Semorile says. "They then strike that pose you have been waiting your whole tank of air for, right after you have shot your last frame of film or refocused your lens ten times."

PhotoMedia salutes the entrants in this spring's World in Focus Photo Contest.

In June of this year, PhotoMedia presented World in Focus, a multifaceted three-day event with an exciting mission: "To promote the awareness of the critical need to preserve and protect the beauty and diversity of our natural world and its cultures through the visual messages of photographers."

The event, held in Seattle, included inspiring seminars with some of the foremost nature, environmental and endangered-cultures photographers in the industry.

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..."