certainly appearing to be a pile of gemstones, this is actually a extreme closeup shot of a flower anther. within the middle of a gladiolus flower, you'll find four long and narrow stems protruding from the center of each bloom. three of these have a tiny banana-shaped pod (anther) on the end, and the remaining one (stigma) has three tiny fingers on the end. if you zoom into the anther, it appears something like a long canoe-like boat heaping full of cargo. zooming in more (and from the side), you can get a clear view of the 'cargo' of cells stacked up in the anther/boat. this photo is a tiny portion of that cargo and each 'gem' is about half the area of a human hair. (check out our "Sea Monster" shot to see the neighboring stigma up close.)

south-eastern Utah

home grown soda bottles? well, not quite. laying across the bottom of the photo is the edge of a daisy's stem, and the 'bottle' is a single hair/fuzz (1/60 of an inch in height) protruding from that stem. daisy plants have bristly stems (in between soft and prickly) so the fuzz has a larger diameter making it more stiff, and as we recently discovered... it's also hollow and uniquely shaped. to add a little colour, we placed a small piece of yellow tractor-feed paper as a background, so that the out-of-focus hole created a nice glow on the horizon.

despite it's appearance, this is not a coral reef growth, nor anything under the ocean. it is actually a closeup shot within the center of a daisy. we were surprised to discover that the flower's fuzzy brown cone was made up of these finger-like structures that looked so much like something under the sea. the photo captures 0.036 x 0.054 inches (about the thickness of a DVD) of the flower's center cone.

It looked like this giant balanced rock was a hand pointing straight up into the sky. I could have wrote something real philosophical, especially since this was located in the "Garden of the Gods" but as I was standing near its base, I just hoped it wasn't time for this magnificent piece to settle.

southwestern Utah

Sunlight reflecting from the pond's surface, was shining up through a lily pad leaf that had grown to a few inches above the water. I loved the way it illuminated the structure of the leaf and it reminded me of modern fractal art (complex patterns generated by mathematical algorithms).

Raindrop suspended on small branch