Activist and author Susan Sontag died of leukemia on Dec. 28, 2004, at the age of 71. It was Sontag’s third bout with cancer since 1976, a disease that informed much of her writing in the last few decades.

Sontag was born Susan Rosenblatt in New York City, in 1933. Following the death of her father when she was five, the family lived in Arizona and Los Angeles, where her mother married an Army officer, Capt. Nathan Sontag.

After graduating from North Hollywood High School at 15, she attended...

Richard McEnery discusses the various continuing education options.

A father gets a new digital camera for Christmas. He sets out to learn more about his camera, reads about the Nikon School’s one-day digital photography classes and decides this is for him. Now he’s hooked.

An amateur nature photographer does a weekend field workshop with Darrell Gulin and gets some amazing images of an osprey feeding its young. She decides to attend the annual Nature Photography Summit and Trade Show, sponsored by the North American Nature Photographers Association...

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...

He's climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He's been placed under house arrest in Somalia. He's crossed the Sahara Desert, circumnavigated the world and retraced the ancient Silk Road from Istanbul to China, all by motorcycle.

He became the first motorcyclist to ride from South America to North America through Panama's Darien Gap, a notorious 80-mile stretch of almost impenetrable trails throughbug-filled jungle and swamp. After three weeks in the Gap, he arrived in Panama City with broken bones and infected legs.

He has hung out the window of a helicopter over rough Norwegian seas, photographing rescues of crews on sinking ships. "We flew for four to five hours with one guy who broke his back and they couldn't give him medication — it was agonizing," remembers Helge Pedersen, a Seattle photojournalist and traveling...