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Photograph by Carsten Peter
From "Chasing Lightning," National Geographic, August 2012Back on the highway with his 1,600-pound camera in tow, Tim Samaras hunts for the elusive shot. This summer he's on the chase again, with new, nimbler equipment.
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Photograph by Chinafotopress/Getty Images
From "Visions of Earth," National Geographic, August 2012China—On his way to second place in a bee-wearing contest in Hunan Province, a contestant disappears beneath a carpet of insects lured by a queen bee in a cage. A scale he was standing upon tallied his total take: about 50 pounds of bees.
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Photograph by Aaron Huey
From "Pine Ridge Indian Reservation," National Geographic, August 2012Spiritual Ways
With the reverence afforded a sacred being, Oglala men fell a specially chosen cottonwood tree and carry it to the center of a Sun Dance circle. Erected in the earth, the tree will become the focus of a days-long spiritual ceremony. Sun Dances and other traditional ceremonies have undergone a resurgence since the 1970s. -
Photograph by Marie-Pier Couture
From "Top Shots," National Geographic, August 2012During a break from her job working with aerial photographs of cities, mining facilities, and forests around Canada, Couture, 30, visited one of her favorite animals at the zoo in St.-Félicien. She watched this polar bear drift lazily up and down in the water several times.
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Photograph by Carsten Peter
From "Chasing Lightning," National Geographic, August 2012Horizontal, cloud-to-cloud lightning bolts—called anvil crawlers, for their tendency to “crawl” along the bottom of anvil-shaped storm clouds—light up the sky near Greensburg, Kansas.
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Photograph by Alex Webb
From "East London," National Geographic, August 2012“The East End of London is a world in itself,” wrote Charles Dickens. The constellation of skyscrapers in Canary Wharf's financial district is a world within that world, built from docklands abandoned in the 1960s, when shipping moved downriver to deeper water.
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Photograph by Michael Yamashita
From "Tibetan Gold," National Geographic, August 2012Faces shielded from the sun, digging tools in hand, Tibetan families can search all day for the larvae, called yartsa gunbu. Some stalks poke barely a quarter inch out of the ground.
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Photograph by Carsten Peter
From "Chasing Lightning," National Geographic, August 2012Guided by the laptop weather map reflected in his window, Tim Samaras rushes to catch up to a dying thunderstorm. He hopes to be the first to photograph the split-second event that triggers a lightning strike.
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Photograph by Jody MacDonald
From "Visions of Earth," National Geographic, August 2012India—Trees infused with sunlight dwarf an early morning visitor to the rain forest on Havelock Island. Rajan, an Asian elephant retired from logging, takes the stroll as part of his daily routine and occasionally swims in the Andaman Sea.
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Photograph by Michael Yamashita
From "Tibetan Gold," National Geographic, August 2012A ten-year-old girl's gloved hand holds the tiny, dirt-covered biological curiosity: Yartsa gunbu is a combination of moth larva (caterpillar) and parasitic fungus. The high-priced “worms,” as the infected larvae are called, are believed to cure everything from hair loss to hepatitis.
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Photograph by Carsten Peter
From "Chasing Lightning," National Geographic, August 2012A cloud-to-ground lightning strike severs the sky near Los Lunas, New Mexico. Tim Samaras and his crew chased the slow-moving storm cell until they ran out of road, and now can only watch as it moves on. New Mexico's sparse road system makes lightning chasing difficult. Far easier to navigate are the tight grids of farm roads crisscrossing the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles.
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Photograph by Carsten Peter
From "Chasing Lightning," National Geographic, August 2012A ground fire ignited by a lightning storm near Elephant Butte, New Mexico, paints the horizon with brown smoke. At right, another cloud-to-ground strike flashes through a shaft of rain.
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Photograph by Aaron Huey
From "Pine Ridge Indian Reservation," National Geographic, August 2012Nine-year-old Wakinyan Two Bulls places prayer flags in a tree near Mato Tipila (“bear lodge”), or Devils Tower, in Wyoming. The story of the Oglala—their spirituality and their fight to remedy old wrongs—goes well beyond the Pine Ridge Reservation.
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