NAT GEO'S MOST AMAZING PHOTOS

One of only a handful of people to earn a Ph.D. under the world’s most respected ecologist, E.O. Wilson, Mark Moffett has written or photographed more than two dozen articles for National Geographic. He is a modern-day explorer with more than a little luck on his side, having accidentally sat on the world’s deadliest snake, battled drug lords with dart guns, and scrambled up a tree to escape bull elephants. For him such risks are worth it, as part of his mission to find stories that make people fall in love with the unexpected: insects, frogs, and other of nature’s small wonders.

When not on expedition, Moffett divides his time between research positions at the University of California at Berkeley and the Smithsonian Institution, for which he curated an exhibit in 2009 based entirely on his personal research and photography. In May 2010, Moffett will be releasing his newest book, Adventures Among Ants.

David Doubilet is honoured to have his underwater imagery considered to be among the best by editors, peers and colleagues the world over.  He has photographed over 60 stories for the <em>National Geographic </em>magazine where he is currently a Contributing Photographer-in-Residence. David has documented our changing underwater world since his first assignment with the Geographic in 1971. In addition to National Geographic, David’s work continues to appear in countless publications worldwide and he is a contributing editor and feature columnists for the Behind the Shot in Sport Diver Magazine (US) and Seascapes and Dive Magazine (UK).

Born in New York City in 1946, David began shooting underwater at the age of 12 using a Brownie Hawkeye camera in an improvised housing - a rubber anaesthesiologist’s bag from his father’s hospital. His teen years found him submerged off the New Jersey coast and in the Caribbean waters surrounding tiny Small Hope Bay, Bahamas. He built a passion for the sea and everything in it.

David’s challenge to himself is to redefine photographic boundaries each time he enters the water. His passion is the undersea majesty of light and how to capture it. Completely at home on a coral reef, a World War II wreck, a deep dark fjord or among the great giants in our sea, David has relentlessly pursued the many hidden layers of coral reefs around the globe. His cold-water work has immersed him in the rich waters of New Zealand, Tasmania, Scotland, Japan, the Northwest Atlantic and Northeast Pacific. Recent photographic journeys have taken him into some of the largest freshwater systems on our planet such as the great Okavango Delta system in Botswana and the St. Lawrence River. David has authored seven books on the sea. The most recent are: Fish Face by Phaidon Publishers (2003), The Kingdom of Coral: Australia’s Great Barrier Reef by National Geographic Books (2002) and Water Light and Time by Phaidon Publishers (1999). He is the recipient of the many prestigious awards, including: The Sara Prize, The Explorers Club Lowell Thomas Award and the Lennart Nilsson Award in Photography. David is a member of both the Royal Photographic Society and International Diving Hall of fame.

Carsten Peter, a World Press Photo award winner and regular contributor to National Geographic magazine, specialises in going to extremes: scuba diving in a glacier on Mont Blanc, crossing the Sahara on a camel, caving in Borneo. He searches for wild places where his survival depends on his wits and his skills as a technical climber, paraglider, caver, diver, and canyoneer.

He is enthusiastically obsessed with devising innovative photographic techniques to capture never-before-seen images from some of the scariest environments on the planet. His many adventures include braving toxic caverns and acid waterfalls to shoot within the deepest ice shafts on Earth, rappelling into active volcanoes with turbulent lava lakes and superheated thermal caves, and breaking altitude records while flying his motorized paraglider.

In addition to his World Press award—for his coverage of tornadoes while storm chasing in the U.S. West—he has received an Emmy Award for his videography from inside an active volcano in the South Pacific. His images have been published in National Geographic and other magazines.

Chris Rainier is considered one of the leading documentary photographers working today. His mysterious images of sacred places and indigenous peoples of the planet have been seen in the leading publications of the day including: Time, Life, National Geographic publications, Outside, Condé Nast Traveller, The New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, Islands, The New Yorker and the publications of the International Red Cross, The United Nations, and Amnesty International. Rainier, a Canadian citizen, is a photographer for the National Geographic Society and specializes in documenting indigenous cultures for the Societies Cultures Initiative. His life’s mission is to empower Indigenous peoples by helping them to use photography and technology to enhance their culture & lives.

Chris is a National Geographic Fellow, is a Co-Director of the Enduring Voices Language Preservation Project, a Co-Director of the National Geographic Society Cultures Ethnosphere Program, and Director of the Society’s All Roads Photography Program.

His photographs and books have been widely exhibited and collected around the world, and he has received numerous awards for his photography, including five Picture of the Year Awards for his continued documentation of vanishing tribes, A Communication Arts award for his last book on New Guinea, and an International Golden Light Award in 1994 for his first book, Keepers of the Spirit.  Chris was included in American Photo Magazine's 100 Most Influential People Working in Photography Today list.  Rainier has travelled to all seven continents, and has been apart of an expedition to the North Pole and seven expeditions to Antarctica.

Rainier is Director of a website connecting tribal cultures around the globe through the internet, at The Enduring Voices Project (languagehotspots.org) at The National Geographic Society.  Chris serves on two boards as a board member and in an advisory role: Cultural Survival, Cambridge, MA, and Telluride Mountain Film Festival, CO.

From 1980 to 1985, Rainier was photographic assistant to Ansel Adams - the noted landscape photographer.  Rainier continues to lecture and teach seminars on photography as a tool for social change, both internationally and in North America. He lives both in New York State, and among the mountains & streams in Colorado.

Brian Skerry is a photojournalist specialising in marine wildlife and underwater environments. Since 1998 he has been an assignment photographer for National Geographic Magazine covering a wide range of subjects and stories.

An award-winning photographer, Brian is praised worldwide for his aesthetic sense as well as his journalistic drive for relevance. His uniquely-creative images tell stories that not only celebrate the mystery and beauty of the sea, but also help bring attention to the large number of issues that endanger our oceans and its inhabitants.

Unique within the field of underwater photography is Brian’s ability to pursue subjects of great diversity. He typically spends eight months each year in the field and in the course of any given year frequently finds himself in environments of extreme contrast from tropical coral reefs to diving beneath Arctic ice. While on assignment he has lived on the bottom of the sea, spent months aboard fishing boats and travelled in everything from snowmobiles to canoes to helicopters to get the picture. He has spent more than 15,000 hours underwater over the last thirty years.

For National Geographic magazine, Brian has covered a wide range of stories, from the harp seal’s struggle to survive in frozen waters to the alarming decrease in the world’s fisheries, both cover stories. Other features have focused on subjects such as the planet's last remaining pristine coral reefs, the plight of the right whale, sharks of the Bahamas, marine reserves, sea turtles and squid. He has published eleven stories in NGM and has several new stories upcoming.

Brian has also worked on assignment for or had images featured in magazines such as People, Sports Illustrated, US News and World Report, BBC Wildlife, Smithsonian, Playboy, Esquire, Audubon, Outdoor Life, GEO, Maxim, and Men’s Journal and in countless publications worldwide. He is also the author/photographer of three books.

Ed Kashi is a photojournalist dedicated to documenting the social and political issues that define our times. A sensitive eye and an intimate relationship to his subjects have become the signatures of his award-winning work, and his complex imagery has been recognized for its compelling rendering of the human condition Born in New York City in 1957, Kashi graduated from Syracuse University in 1979 with a degree in photojournalism and has since photographed in more than 60 countries.

His images have appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Time, MediaStorm, GEO, Newsweek, and many other domestic and international publications. Kashi's first project for National Geographic was a cover story on the Kurds. It was subsequently published as his second monograph, When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds. Since then he has covered many subjects for National Geographic, including Syria, the Zulus of South Africa, the Danube, and oil in the Niger Delta.

Most recently, Kashi's innovative approach to photography and filmmaking produced the Iraqi/Kurdistan Flipbook, which premiered on MSNBC.com in December 2006. Using stills in a moving image format, this creative and thought-provoking form of visual storytelling garnered an award from the 26th annual Black Maria Film and Video Festival (2007) and was utilized in a series of exhibitions on the Iraq War presented at The George Eastman House. Kashi's personal projects include documentary work on the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, self-published in a book titled The Protestants: No Surrender. In the mid-'90s, Kashi spent several years documenting the lives of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The settlers' story has been published worldwide, and a photograph from this essay received an award in the World Press Photo 1995 competition.

In 2003, Kashi completed an eight-year project called Aging in America: The Years Ahead, which included a travelling exhibition, an award-winning documentary film, a Web site, and a book. This work examines the social impact of the expanding elderly population in the United States. Features from this project won awards from the Pictures of the Year and World Press Photo and were chosen for the American Photography and Communication Arts annuals. The book was named one of the best photo books of 2003 by American Photo magazine.

Photojournalist Amy Toensing has been on assignment for national and international publications such as National Geographic magazine, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time, and the Boston Globe.

Toensing began her professional career in 1994 as a staff photographer at her hometown paper, the Valley News in Hanover, New Hampshire. She then worked three years in Washington, D.C., covering the White House and Capitol Hill for the New York Times. In 1998, Toensing left D.C. to receive her master's degree in photography from the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. Since 2000, she has been freelancing for various editorial publications and private organizations and is a regular contributor to National Geographic.

Toensing's stories are intimate essays reflecting the lives of ordinary people. In Puerto Rico she portrayed the diverse cultural heritage of an island influenced by outside rule for more than 500 years (National Geographic, March 2003). Her coverage of Monhegan Island, a winter lobstering and artist community off the Maine coast, documented the way of life in this remote outpost (National Geographic, July 2001).

In 2003 Toensing was named the Photographic Alumni Fellow at the SALT Centre for Documentary Field Studies in Portland, Maine, where she continued a long-term project on Muslim teenage girls living in Western culture.

Fritz Hoffmann is recognised for his photographic work documenting change in China as a resident photojournalist based in Shanghai from 1995-2008. His pictures have been widely published and exhibited. He is a frequent contributor to National Geographic magazine. Hoffmann’s work has made an important contribution to world understanding of modern China. He was the first foreign photographer since 1949 to receive accreditation from China’s Foreign Ministry to reside outside Beijing, the political capital. He studied Mandarin at East China University of Science and Technology and at Shanghai University Academy of Fine Art. He has photographed in each of China’s provinces and municipalities several times. China continues to be the primary focus of his work.

Prior to his move to China, Fritz established his place as a respected international photojournalist while working with JB Pictures in New York. Under the JB banner, he moved his base of operations to Nashville, Tennessee just before the first term of US President Bill Clinton, which increased interest in the American South. After JB closed, he opened the Network Photographers (UK), Shanghai bureau in 1997 as photo-correspondent. In 2002 Fritz co-founded the online picture library, ”Document China”, now concluded.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Fritz was raised in a large family with a history of craftsmen. He began photography as a kid hitchhiking across the Pacific Northwest and then printing his pictures in the home darkroom. He honed his photography skills while slinging king crab in Dutch Harbour, Alaska. Fritz supported his early travel and photography with work as a carpenter. Travel experiences steered him to pursue social documentary photography and reportage. He spent 5 years working at newspapers in Seattle, Charleston, West Virginia and Knoxville, Tennessee before entering magazine work.

Born in San Francisco, David Alan Harvey was raised in Virginia and completed his undergraduate degree at the Richmond branch of the College of William and Mary.
From there he moved to Missouri, receiving his graduate degree from the Missouri School of Journalism. In 1969 he began to work for the Topeka Capital-Journal in Kansas, where he was encouraged to photograph in colour. A grant from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts gave him the means to pursue a wide variety of stories, including a yearlong reportage of Virginia Beach.

Harvey has photographed more than 40 articles for National Geographic, beginning with a story about Tangier Island, Virginia, in the November 1973 issue of the magazine. He has since covered a wide range of subjects, including hip-hop music, Vietnam, North Carolina's Outer Banks, Tokyo, Grenada, Malaysia, the Puget Sound, the Maya, stock car racing, and Barcelona.

In 1978, Harvey was named Magazine Photographer of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). He has lectured and led seminars at various universities and has conducted many workshops, including the Santa Fe Workshop, the Annual Photographic Seminar in Steamboat Springs, the Eddie Adams Workshop, the Missouri Workshop, and the Maine Photographic Workshop.

Harvey's work has been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Nikon Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. His photographs have appeared in Life, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated. He has published two books, Cuba and Divided Soul.

Harvey joined Magnum Photos as an associate in 1993 and became a member in 1997. He is based in New York.