Spring can't come soon enough for this young whitetail deer, struggling to stand on a frozen Montana lake. The effort to rescue this exhausted yearling was covered by Robin Loznak, chief photographer at the Daily Inter Lake, a newspaper in Kalispell, Mont.

Last November, Loznak heard about a deer trapped on the slick ice of nearby Middle Foy's Lake and drove out to the scene, where he saw several workers from the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department trying to get to the animal. "The ice was only about an inch thick, so no one could walk on it," Loznak explains. "It was so smooth, the deer just couldn't get his footing at all..."

Part man? Part frog? You decide.

Freelance photographer Jason Millstein's image of a swimmer launching into his backstroke during a high school competition in Fort Pierce, Fla., captures the strength, speed and determination of today's young athletes. Taken in 2000, while Millstein was a staffer for the Palm Beach Post, the photo won him a National Press Photographers Association Monthly News Clip Contest award in the Sports category.

But sports photography is hardly his only specialty. Millstein's website (illumephotography.com) demonstrates his versatility as a shooter, covering such disparate topics as portraits, nature and landscapes, editorial photography, and weddings, along with various magazine photo essays.

What do you get when you mix together a group of modern ballet dancers, a barren landscape and a freelance photographer who doesn't take himself too seriously? If that photographer is the itinerant Albert Normandin, the answer is "Jump," an image that sums up his kinetic style and love of spontaneity.

The shot was taken in August 2000 ("It seems like so long ago," Normandin says) outside of Las Vegas. "We just went out to the desert, and I let them jump around and shot about 150 rolls," he says. "I like to work that way, just let them go with it...

Spring is definitely in the air for this happy couple. Their costumes may seem unusual, but their eternal, happy pursuit is universally recognizable. This image, by Portland, Ore., photographer Andy Batt, was made for the Oregon Ballet Theatre (OBT) to promote the troupe's fall 2005 performance of the ballet "Angelo,” by choreographer Julia Adam.

The ballet, an interpretation of the famous "All the world's a stage” soliloquy from Shakespeare's "As You Like It,” depicts seven stages of a man's life. In this OBT production, all of the life stages were designed around the same set piece: the trunk of a tree.

To capture the feeling of the drama, Batt chose to shoot the dancers outdoors, using a real tree at Council Crest Park, just west of Portland...

Winter has a way of transforming even the most recognizable places into fairy-tale fantasies almost overnight. Just turn down the temperature a few degrees and the lush greenery of Oregon's famous Multnomah Falls suddenly resembles a scene out of Norse mythology. Photographer Janis Miglavs captured this frosty image with his medium-format Mamiya 645 camera, using Provia 100 film, during an unusually cold winter in the Portland area. "This is one of the most visited, most photographed tourist spots in the whole state of Oregon," he says. "But on that day, I was the only one around. I never saw any footprints. It was just this wonderland of snow and ice."

Miglavs is a well known adventure travel photographer who has seen some of the most exotic lands on the planet...

Ever feel like you have one too many balls in the air? How about too many office supplies? That's the mood captured here in "Balancing," by photography student Sheila Menezes.

The image won first prize in the College & University — Computer-Assisted category of the Photo Imaging Education Association's (PIEA) 2004 International Student-Teacher Photo Exhibition and Competition in January.

Menezes, a graduate student at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif., says that the title of the photo also describes the balance of her two favorite genres of photography, portraiture and still life. "It's one of my favorite images, but I find it so ironic that I won the prize with it," she admits...

Rob Sinclair’s nighttime image of Castle Geyser in Yellowstone National Park is proof that if a hydrothermal eruption happens and there are no tourists there to gawk at it, it’s still beautiful.

Shot in October 2006, the image is part of Sinclair’s ongoing, self-directed project to photograph the wonders of the national park system at night. "I’ve only done three parks, so I’ve got a long way to go," says the Sammamish, Wash.-based nature photographer.

Geysers in Yellowstone, which have been captured easily in countless tourist snapshots since the park opened in 1872, become particularly difficult subjects to photograph once the sun goes down and the mercury drops. Unlike its punctual cousin, Old Faithful, just a short hike away, Castle Geyser is an elusive spectacle...

After spending a large part of his career in Southeast Asia, photojournalist Richard Vogel thought he had seen every type of Buddha statue as he covered various religious shrines and festivals for the Associated Press. Until he saw this one in 1996.

While on a two-year stint in Thailand, Vogel came across this uncharacteristic Buddha representation in a well-hidden part of Bangkok. "I had no idea what that Buddha statue looked like and was very surprised when I saw it," he recalls. "It had these giant feet, which was very unusual, and people were praying and putting gold leaf on it."

Vogel, who prefers to be "as a fly on the wall," snapped this quiet image of a man praying at the Buddha’s heel and left him undisturbed. Later, Vogel transmitted the image to the AP wire, where it was sent worldwide...

Few images better evoke the idea of summer than sun, water and happy kids. Ric Peterson's image of children in mid-leap toward a seemingly limitless lakeside horizon is the perfect way to close our summer issue.

The image came about after Peterson had photographed an ad campaign for Guidance Medical, depicting two boys running along a sun-soaked beach using towels as capes. "I thought, 'This has potential,' Peterson says, so he decided to shoot some more images involving children, water and movement for his stock collection.

A dedicated family man, Peterson included his own family members in this particular scene, which was shot on Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota during a summer vacation...

This image of a northern pygmy owl calling to its mate from a woodpecker hole in a quaking aspen tree took just a fraction of a second to make.

For wildlife photographer Paul Bannick, however, it took days of careful tracking, observation of avian behavior and infinite patience to capture the moment. After traipsing through the still-snowy woods last spring in the south-central Washington Cascades, he heard an owl call, so he gave a response. Then a second owl joined in.

"After that, I listened and watched, not wanting to disturb the couple," he recalls.

After observing the pair for a few days, Bannick saw a fist-size female fly into a hole made by a hairy woodpecker, indicating acceptance of the cavity as a new nest...