The software giant gets serious about catering to professional photographers with a new web site and a host of advanced image processing tools for Windows.

Although many creative types consider the Apple Macintosh to be the platform of choice for serious graphics work, most working photographers out there still are wedded to their Microsoft Windows-based systems for image processing and management, as well as for running their businesses. However, market dominance has not stopped Microsoft from continuously working to optimize Windows (both the current XP version and the forthcoming Vista) in order to meet the needs of today's digitally focused pro shooters.

For Microsoft, digital photography really came of age in 2003, when sales of digital cameras began to outpace those of film cameras. The company decided it needed to do more to meet the growing...

Environmental photography goes mainstream, as conservation groups increasingly use imagery as a tool to convey the plight of the world's few remaining wild lands.

Perhaps one of the most dedicated photographers ever, William Henry Jackson was not one to travel lightly. During his surveying journeys of the American West in the 1860s, he needed a horse and pack mule to lug his primitive 8x10-inch field camera, several large glass photographic plates and a canvas-tent darkroom. The efforts of Jackson (and his mule) were not in vain, however: the photographs he sent back to Washington, D.C., helped persuade Congress to create Yellowstone National Park, laying the groundwork for a land preservation system that has spread around the world...

Home, Studio & Gallery: Santa Cruz, Calif.

Website: franslanting.com

Staff: Depending on which projects are in the works, Lanting employs up to a dozen workers.

Books: "Eye to Eye" (Taschen, 2003); "Jungles" (Taschen, 2000); "Penguin" (Taschen, 1999); "Living Planet: Preserving Edens of the Earth" (Crown, 1999); "Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape" (University of California Press, 1997); "Okavango: Africa's Last Eden" (Chronicle, 1993); "Madagascar: A World Out of Time" (Aperture, 1990).

He's been nearly eaten alive by the natural world he photographs, but Frans Lanting keeps going back for more, to capture glimpses of wildlife most people will never see face to face.

He's been nearly eaten alive by the natural world he photographs, but Frans Lanting keeps going back for more, to capture glimpses of wildlife most people will never see face to face.

He has watched insects consume his tent before his eyes. He has lived in environments so oppressively dank and humid that fungus would grow on his lenses. He's lost count of how many camera bodies have been consumed by the rain forests he's crossed. To capture elusive wildlife in its native state, he's done whatever it takes, be it hiding for hours in the mud behind wet foliage, or building a 100-foot steel platform in the forest. And did we mention the larvae that burst forth from underneath his own skin?...

Destinations: Mount St. Helens, Roddy Scheer captures the volcano’s explosive beauty. As I rounded the curve in my van, there before me, in all her majesty, stood Mount St. Helens, aglow in the golden morning light. I pulled into the Bear Meadow turnout, parked and walked over to the spot where unemployed taxi driver and amateur photographer Gary Rosenquist had risked life and limb 25 years before to shoot those famous time-lapse photographs of the mountain in mid-eruption.