Keep Your Head In The Clouds... With Your Camera Pointed All Around

"A dream is where a boy can swim in the deepest oceans and fly over the highest clouds."--J.K. Rowling

This month's department helps you soar with the eagles, land with the owls, and introduces you to some down-to-earth photographers who look at the world in completely new ways. In accomplishing these goals, this month's photographers will travel from Africa to Arizona, along with exploring parts of inner space.

Photographic Artistry
You can view Yvonne Suter's website (www.yvonnesuter.com) two ways: Flash, if you have the bandwidth, and HTML if you don't. Either way, Suter's site delights from its opening slide show, in the Flash version, to the galleries ranging from Urban to Nature. The galleries' design are a delight, eschewing the ubiquitous thumbnails for slivers of images arranged in a delightful panorama highlighting Suter's technical and aesthetic skills. The monochrome Urban images offer glimpses of a bleak landscape where people appear as silhouettes, if at all. "High Rise Reflections" takes this concept to new levels, displaying window reflections that take anthropomorphic shapes and seem as alive as dancers in a ballet.

The wonderfully minimalistic images on Yvonne Suter's website take on an otherworldly look that should help answer bored photographers' age-old lament that "there's nothing left to photograph."
© 2004, Yvonne Suter, All Rights Reserved

The color photographs in Botanika are less bleak and have the meditative Zen introspection that forces the question: "Are these photographs?" Who cares? They're art. Similarly, the wonderfully minimalistic images of an abandoned greenhouse take on an otherworldly look that answers the age-old bored photographer's lament that "there's nothing left to photograph." Suter's response is clearly that art is all around us, even in the most unlikely places. Although not the easiest site to navigate, it works if you're not in a hurry. The creative design is by Misterbear.com who also has a site (www.misterbear.com) worth visiting, if only for the whimsical Flash (www.macromedia.com) opening.

On Cloud Nine

Peter J. Mancus' website (www.cloud9photography.us) features his work as well as others who, like him, are experts at photographing airplanes (mostly) in flight. According to Mancus, 85 percent of the aircraft on the site are no longer produced, so this is a chance for collectors to find amazing photographs including Mancus' shot of MiG-15 among the clouds, resplendent in Cold War livery. Site design could best be described as "sprawling" so the best way to enjoy it is to jump in and keep scrolling (and scrolling) and clicking on the large thumbnails. If you are looking for something specific, click on "Airplane Pictures Catalog" and keep scrolling until something--such as Nose Art--strikes your fancy. This gallery presents large images of World War II nostalgia such as "Photo Fanny" painted on the side of a B-25 Mitchell bomber. Mancus' in-flight photography is the best that I've ever seen and any aviation fan who wants a photograph of their favorite warbird will find outstanding images of them on Cloud 9--and at reasonable prices.

Peter J. Mancus' in-flight photography of aircraft is the best that I've seen and any fan of aviation who wants a photograph of their favorite warbird will find outstanding images of them on Cloud 9.
© 2004, Peter J. Mancus, All Rights Reserved

ARTICLE CONTENTS

X