Though looks can't kill, this one just might. It's a close-up of the eye of Arothron mappa, also known as the scribbled pufferfish. It's hardly a man-eater, but don't try to turn it into sushi: Its flesh contains a neurotoxin that can be deadly.

The image was shot at night by photographer Murray S. Kaufman, while the pufferfish was dozing in a reef in the Sulawesi Sea. Diving off Mabul Island, near the southeast coast of Malaysian Borneo, Kaufman noticed the fish because it was a juvenile and, therefore, more colorful than the adult kind. "I got about a foot away from it when I snapped the picture," he says. "Usually you get one strobe shot and they take off, but I was able to get a few images."...

Nothing heralds the advent of spring like a romp through a sunlit front yard. "Hula Hoop Dancing," by freelance photographer Manuello Paganelli, captures the joyful anticipation of the warm days to come. The idea for the image came spontaneously during a shoot for a Vespa scooter ad near Paganelli's home in North Hollywood, Calif. While taking a break from photographing a model in various poses on a scooter, one of his assistants suggested that Paganelli experiment with some of the playful props they had brought to the shoot, including a number of colorful hula hoops. As the model struggled to smile at the camera and keep all the hoops spinning at once, Paganelli started photographing with his Mamiya RZ67 and 90mm lens, using reflectors to enhance the available early-morning light...

San Francisco is a city built on an active fault zone and is famous for having a decidedly off-kilter subculture. It’s only natural, then, that the city’s unstable beauty should be captured perfectly by a jiggly dessert. Bay Area artist and photographer Liz Hickok may have cornered the market on a truly unique artistic pursuit: gelatin sculpting. Always interested in maps and models, Hickok set about building a scale model of the city three years ago, while she was pursuing a master’s degree in fine arts at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. After experimenting with various media to form buildings, she found them all either too difficult or too expensive.

"I’m a bit of a 'foodie' and love sweets,” she says. "And I’ve always been attracted to color and light, so I sort of stumbled on the idea of Jell-O...

In the year since Sept. 11, 2001, we've seen many somber images fraught with the significance of that day. As we head toward another winter of uncertainty, it's nice to be reminded of the days when art was more often created for art's sake.

This joyous sculpture, dancing amid its own solar system, was captured by stock photographer Larry Brownstein just days before the 9/11 attacks, while he was attending a week-long event known as the Burning Man Festival.

Held every year the week before Labor Day, Burning Man is a free-form gathering of the avant-garde, who create temporary artworks in the remote Black Rock Desert outside Reno, Nev. At the end of the week, an enormous wooden statue in the shape of a standing figure is burned in a ritual bonfire, the significance of which is left to each viewer to decide...

Bay Area photographers Greg Lorenz and Kim Avelar specialize in tricking the eye, in creating images that appear to be real but couldn't possibly exist. In their world, woodpeckers have drill bits for beaks; barracudas cruise the deep with submarine propellers; plants spread solar panels instead of leaves.

And clouds are launched with just a brushstroke and a stepladder.

Although this whimsical scene looks like a clever trick of perspective, it's actually a carefully constructed composite image – a specialty of the husband-and-wife duo. The background image of field and sky was taken on a road trip in Montana. The ladder and model were shot later, using the same 24mm lens under similar outdoor lighting conditions, and merged with the first image via Photoshop...

Is this some kind of rare jewel? Or perhaps a luridly lit cave? How about a landscape from the latest fantasy video game? A computer was involved in making the image, but the subject is all too real. If this spiky terrain gives you a slightly queasy feeling, there's a reason: it's a kidney stone. Not actual size, of course, just one magnified 400 times and presented in a rainbow of false color. This image, made in 1998, is one of hundreds of specimens – animal, vegetable and mineral – shot by photographer and scientist David Scharf, a world-renowned pioneer in microscopy. For more than 30 years, Scharf, based in Los Angeles, has painstakingly documented a world that is largely unseen by the naked eye, bringing out the beauty in the grotesque.

Like most kidney stones, the one seen here is made mostly of jagged-edged calcium oxylate crystals. "You can see why they hurt so much," Scharf says. "Even at this magnification, it looks like a bunch of razor blades."...

After several articles about the overheated antics and egos of studio shoots, we thought we'd end this issue with an idyllic scene of natural splendor: Claire Curran's "Maple Leaves in Workman Creek," shot in Arizona's rugged Sierra Ancha Mountains.
"Actually, it's one of the filthiest creeks I've ever seen," Curran says. "Each time I go there, I have to do a major sweep of all the beer cans and plastic bags lying around."
So much for idyll...

Bill Dobbins, known as one of the world's foremost photographers of female bodybuilders, often compares the supremely sculpted models he shoots to landscapes.
"Those who shoot traditional nudes tend to focus on soft, clean lines of the human body," he says. "But with body builders, with the definition they have in their physiques, you have hills and valleys all over. I often will pose them against rocks or a desert background as if they were part of the landscape."
Or, in this case, poolscape.

About five years ago, while shooting images of model Suzanna McGee — who he describes as an "Amazonian athlete, bodybuilder and tennis player" — Dobbins saw an opportunity to photograph the human form against a different kind of background. While taking a break from shooting, McGee decided to take a dip in a nearby pool. While she swam laps, Dobbins took some photos of McGee's powerful underwater strokes...

The old saying "you are what you eat" takes on new meaning in this nude study by Seattle photographer Matt Freedman. Shot for a proposed book project, "Citrus" is part of an ongoing series of images created jointly by Freedman and James Beard Award-winning chef Tiberio Simone, owner of Seattle's La Figa Catering.

Called "La Figa: Visions of Food and Form," (lafigaproject.com), the photo series is a collection of posed nudes that are adorned — in some cases, totally covered — in painstakingly arranged gourmet ingredients. Here, a model is speckled with lemon, lime and orange slices. Others are painted with chocolate, sprinkled with seeds or buried in berries.

In nearly all of the poses, the sumptuous food brings a heightened sense of eroticism. "Tiberio has had this vision of food and bodies for years," Freedman says of his collaborator. "He's a very sensua...

The current hyperactive state of national politics may seem like an unsolvable puzzle to many pundits. This image by commercial photographer Philip Chudy takes this idea to new extremes.

Shot about four or five years ago for a Hasbro advertisement, the image depicts one of the series of Puzz 3D puzzles that can be assembled into models of the world’s most famous buildings.

Like a puzzle, this playful scene is really constructed of many smaller images, which were taken with both DSLR and medium-format cameras and stitched together digitally. The puzzle, the hand models, the camera, the family and the people in the background were all shot separately in a New York...