Rick Sammon

All photographs start with a great in camera image, right? Well, not really. A good photograph begins as an idea, a vision of how to isolate an interesting subject or subjects in a cluttered scene that will tell a story or communicate an idea or an emotion when a picture is viewed by the photographer and by others.

To illustrate the idea of seeing creatively, I'd...

"Antarctica is a separate world...it is the presence of ice, from the first occasional fragment, escalating in shape, form and frequency, and finally dominating all else, that brings assurance of arrival in Antarctica."--Mark Jones, from Wild Ice: Antarctic Journeys (available on Amazon.com)

Taking pictures in Antarctica is easy. Point your camera...

Last year, I had the opportunity to photograph one of the world's most magnificent waterfalls. I traveled halfway around the world to capture the beauty and awe of this exotic and remote travel destination. I was filled with great photographic expectations.

When I finally reached the falls, I was actually quite disappointed--because there was hardly any...

A few years ago I had the wonderful opportunity to photograph the indigenous people in Kuna Yala, an archipelago of 365 islands that lies a few miles off Panama's Caribbean coast. Some of my pictures of the Kuna were published in this column.

Back then, I was fairly new to digital photography: I shot only JPEG files, used a 4-megapixel digital SLR, packed several...