The Canadian photographer Gregory Colbert is obviously in love with elephants. And whales. And eagles.

Look at his fantastic Flash-based website – Ashes and Snow – and you will think that the images were manipulated in Photoshop or some mysterious process in the darkroom. According to this article, Colbert's images “represent the actual and the possible.”

“The project consisted of 25 expeditions to around the world, to document the interaction between animals and humans, to India to photograph the elephants that are his first love, to Sri Lanka, South Africa, Egypt, and the oceans off the Azores.”

The images from this 10-year project are of epic proportions: “The prints are approximately three feet by ten, on dense, Japanese cloth-like parchment manufactured in a secret medieval process.”

The Ashes and Snow photography exhibition is on view (by ticketed admission) at Hudson River Park’s Pier 54 at West 13th Street, New York City, from March 5 to June 6, 2005. The show is open Tuesdays through Sundays and closed on Mondays. General admission for an adult is $12, with varying prices for other age and economic circumstances, along with a “pay as you wish” admission on Tuesdays.

While I always think the use of light, great content and of course moment beats out all other elements that make a photograph great, composition comes in a very close second.

I recently mentioned the use of the Golden Mean, or the rule of thirds, to compose your images. It's a rule meant to be broken, but it should be a launching pad for beginning students of photography.

I have learned a great deal by delving into this site about composition. The list of articles seem endless and it may take you a while to get through them all. Let me know what you think.

“Forget about perfect lenses, accurate viewfinders and electronic shutters. In fact, forget about the cameras you are used to and discover the world of pinhole cameras. A world of creative freedom, imagination and experimentation which alters our view of reality. You simply won't find a more natural and more magical way to take photographs.”

This may be a far cry from photojournalism, but if you wanted to do something totally left-brain, this is it; construct your own pin-hole camera and go to town.

David Balihar's web site about pinhole photography is a recent find and one worth exploring. Geeks are welcome to try this out too. Balihar offers PC/Windows users a Windows-based program called Pinholedesigner that takes this activity from the left-brain to the right-brain. The program figures out how long your shutter speed needs to be if your pinhole is of a particular aperture. It also figures out the optimal diameter of the pinhole itslef. Pretty slick. For us Mac OS X users, try this program.

And apparently Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day falls on the last Sunday in April. This year it fell on April 24, my son's birthday. Nice to see Rohan already associated with the oldest form of photography. I can't wait to construct a pinhole camera with him out of a Quaker Oats box.