Ever wanted to know what a bee’s knees actually look like? Just coat them with gold and throw them under an electron microscope, no big deal. Or just look at these awesome photos that Rose-Lynn Fisher took, having gone through the trouble for us, from her book, BEE.

Through a close friend who works at a lab, Fisher learned how to use a scanning electron microscope, or SEM, which shines a finely focused electron beam across the bee’s thin gold coating, providing electrical conductivity. This electrical signal is converted into a digital image.

“Stationed at the SEM I felt like an explorer wandering through an alien frontier,” Fisher writes in an e-mail, “moving into closer and closer views of the seemingly endless, intricate forms that comprise one tiny little bee.”

Each increase in magnification revealed something new. “Here is one small insect, yet a whole world in itself!” she writes. “The microscope offers a way to think about the continuum of life from the micro to the macro happening at the same moment, the worlds within worlds that comprise our universe.”

Some of these photos reveal surprising structures, like the hooks that bind the hind and forewings during flight; such an elegant adaptation. Close-ups (I’m speaking relatively here) of the body look like epic landscapes sprouting skeleton trees a la Mount St. Helens. The knees, however, the very bee’s knees … really aren’t as impressive, and are actually kind of gross.

Or maybe I'm wrong and they really are the cat's pajamas. What do you think?

"It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow."
— Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Lee Friedlander is touted as one of America's greatest living photographers. He has been shooting most of his life, which began in 1934; his photos appeared in groundbreaking fine art exhibitions in the 1960s and '70s. On the whole, his street scenes and cluttered landscapes are humorous, sarcastic and chaotic.

Now 76 years old, Friedlander could be slowing down. But his latest series suggests the opposite. America By Car, opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art this weekend, is about freedom and velocity — about going nowhere in particular but getting somewhere — a proverbial example of the journey being the reward. Friedlander may be getting on in years, but this just might be his most dynamic and thematic project yet.

The car windows frame cow herds, neon road signs, gawking pedestrians. The mirrors reflect telephone poles, nondescript buildings and, in some cases, Friedlander's camera. America whizzes by, photo after photo, totally unremarkable but somehow still fascinating. According to the exhibition description, Friedlander specified that the 193 photos be densely clustered to evoke "the sensory overload commonly experienced by American drivers." It's controlled chaos, captured from behind the wheel.

If Jack Kerouac was right in saying "the road is life," then Lee Friedlander is thriving.

You can see more photos in this video (if you can get over the annoying whistling).

3:15: What does it mean?

What does yours look like?

Elmo Tide doesn’t have a website. There isn't a biography or resume or mission statement of his to be found online. What he does have is a Flickr page that has been updated exactly twice: once on June 28, 2008, and again on July 31, 2010. His photos have shown up on dozens of alternative art blogs, always with a link to his Flickr page, never with any context; often with the question, "Who is Elmo Tide?" My attempt to uncover the truth ended up sucking me into the warped recesses of Elmo’s tide pools. Who is Elmo Tide? He is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in bacon.

His photographs seem like anachronistic souvenirs from a time that never existed, a weird mix of sleaze and nostalgia littered with archetypes of cowboys, firefighters, wrestlers and strippers. Robert Frank and Fellini go to the carnival.

He declined my first request for an interview but later agreed to answer a few questions by e-mail. What follows is the highly entertaining yet utterly uninformative result.

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Who is Elmo Tide? Why the mystery?

Elmo Tide lives in fading shadows and regret.

Do you have any recurring dreams/nightmares? What happens?

Elmo had dreams. They lifted rage to be heralded as passion and fear to be lauded as irony. In them he felt superior and in his isolated elated thoughts of immortality his endless dread of complete and utter loss wrestled with tubes of empty model airplane glue until waking was as impossible as ending anything that was never begun.

Do you have a desk job?

A desk job is very much like a nose or a boob job in that being unhappy with who we are we hide behind someone else's creation. I made a very small desk from an old matchbox and 4 blood stained tooth picks. I carry it in my breast pocket. In the matchbox is a tiny tome written in classical Arabic which I cannot read.

What did you want to grow up to be when you were young?

When I was little I wanted to grow up to be young. Or fire.

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And there it is folks; Elmo Tide reveals himself. Without really saying anything.

Shawn Hazen is not a Chicago type, but he does love Chicago type — as in typefaces. A graphic designer from California, Hazen moved to the Windy City four years ago and fell for the infinite assortment of exterior fonts — the "unique visual heritage," as he puts it. "I can't help but snap pictures of all the old, cool or quirky type," he writes on his website. "I literally can't got out to get a haircut or a hot dog without having to make a stop to shoot some funky sign."

Speaking of websites, Hazen has an online archive for his findings. But he also shared a few of his favorites — with commentary about what makes the subtly rounded corners of a "simple sans" so special. Warning: This gallery contains nerdiness not suitable for all ages.

3:15: What does it mean?

What does yours look like?

It's state fair season in America. And across the Atlantic, this has traditionally been the time for England's Royal Show, too. Beginning in 1839, it was the country's main agricultural summit, but last year's 160th anniversary marked its final occurrence.

Photographer Arnhel de Serra argues that despite The Royal's demise, agricultural shows are still alive and well. His series, When The Sun Sets Over The Royal, draws from years of photographing them. "Town meets country," he wrote, "has been the inspiration for the project." The shows began as forums for farmers to share tricks of the trade, but they are now flooded with urban dwellers looking for a weekend escape. "It is the rural equivalent of ... beach culture," he writes.

With an eye for the odd, De Serra makes potentially ordinary scenes memorable. Humor, as he says, is at the core of his photos — Erwittian phototoons, you might call them — in part because attendees "understand that working with animals requires a sense of humour." And although the beach still seems more relaxing than a livestock competition, if you're in England and in need of a laugh, one of these shows might be your remedy.

See more of de Serra's work.

3:15: What does it mean?

What does yours look like?

Being a photographer isn't easy. Or cheap. For students in the United Kingdom, one way to get by is to request donations from established photographers — such as signed prints for auctions and fundraisers. But as professor Sian Bonnell says, "This can be quite tedious if you are a photographer ... especially when often it gets sold for less than it cost you to print it."

This year, Bonnell, a professor at England's University College Falmouth, decided to do something different. Instead of prints, he encouraged his students to request the unexpected: favorite recipes. Turns out photographers are just as excited to talk about food as they are photos. As Bonnell wrote in an e-mail, "all the photographers we contacted were queuing up to be involved!"

Say Cheese is a limited-edition collection of favorite recipes from contemporary photographers. Martin Parr, the renowned British artist, submitted England's unofficial national dish of beans on toast (someone had to); American Alec Soth has honored the American classic of mac and cheese. The recipes are photographically illustrated by the art students, and rendered vintage with Poladroid.

Bonnell calls it the "ideal gift" for photography and food lovers alike. Leave your favorite recipe in the comments section, and share a photo in our Flickr pool.

Albums are on my brain. Not only is it that time of year when people are gathering vacation photos in some way — virtual or digital — but my research assistant wrote a blog post about a book project we are working on — a rich written and visual account of the summer of 1909 in Atlantic City, N.J., and I was asked about wedding albums.

There is a great little photograph from 1959 that I collected in Philadelphia a number of summers ago that is now on display. When you enter the National Museum of American History from Constitution Ave., look in the Artifact Wall on your right, just above the heads of Barbie and G.I. Joe, and you will see a black-and-white snapshot of a man and woman sitting on the couch looking at a photo album together. That’s how albums tend to be experienced, side-by-side, one person talking, and others looking at images and listening to tales of adventure and family history (which may not have anything to do with the pictures, of course!).

Perhaps created as souvenirs and a collection of memories, photo albums are often used as storytelling devices. They usually lack written details because the creator often has more to say than space, or inclination, to write it all out. Sometimes there are dates, occasionally names, and maybe a location or two. For this blog, I’ve drawn on three albums from the Photographic History Collection that lack written details. Though they may each look different, they all served the purpose of visually recording scenes near and far from home, and were likely dependent on the maker to infuse the photographs with meaning and zest they were shown to others.

In 1888 when the Kodak “You push the button, we do the rest” camera was introduced, the user sent the camera and exposed film back to the company for processing. Most often those distinctive round photographs were returned on stiff cards. However, one could get them mounted into an album, like that of Dr. and Mrs. Walter Clark. This particular album, with four photographs to a page, records the couple and their traveling companions as they sailed to and visited Egypt. There is the classic image of the corseted Western woman looking out of place and riding sidesaddle on a donkey. If you notice the photograph of the Sphinx, you’ll see that it is not fully excavated from the sand yet. For me, these pictures point to the connections between photography and tourism, the excitement of seeing the wonders of the world and a modest attempt at bringing that enthusiasm home.

As photography became even more accessible, cyanotypes were an inexpensive way to make prints. The iron-based blue photographic paper could be purchased pre-sensitized. All the photographer of this 1893–94 album had to do was place the negative and paper in direct contact, expose to light, and rinse with water when the image emerged.

I confess I also look for unhappy moments in snapshot photography and I had a gleeful moment when noticing the photo of a sunken boat in the album. But the meaning of the photograph shifted a little for me when I learned that the sign painted on the roof of the building in the background, “Notley Hall,” identified a resort along the Potomac River for black Washingtonians. It was also known as Razor Beach, alluding to crime and unsavory behavior. So now I’m confused by the photographer’s meaning of the boat underwater. Was it a coincidental accident in front of the resort? Or did it have something to do with perpetuating a mean-spirited attitude about the resort? Or was the boat owned by one of the men in the adjacent picture with whom the photographer presumably shared oysters? (By the way, if you have maritime-related photographs you can contribute them and your stories to the Museum’s effort to collect tales about life on the water.

The last album sampled here, was created in Los Angeles in the 1950s by Mary Taylor. She spent many years putting the albums together in wallpaper sample books. They were getting picked apart by family members and she gave them to the Museum in 2001 in order to keep her family history intact. Taylor worked at a college fraternity house and some scenes from a Christmas party are mixed in with family photographs of backyard music and dining.

Despite all of these great images that are culturally and historically valuable in and of themselves, the one thing missing from the albums is personal history: there are few, if any, dates, names, or locations, and certainly no written stories. Do give your family and friends (and, potentially, future historians) something to go on by putting some words down and letting your memories linger a little when you aren’t there to regale us with your stories.

If you have been to the National Museum of American History and want to add your photographs to our album, please go to our Flickr page.

Shannon Thomas Perich is an associate curator of the Photographic History Collection at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Her regular contributions to The Picture Show are pulled from the Smithsonian's archives.

3:15: What does it mean?

What does yours look like?

I first came across Alex Prager's photography in 2007. She was in the "fresh" artist feature of Communication Arts magazine, and her work screamed "William Eggleston!" Retro was fresh; I liked it. And Prager is unruffled by that comparison; it was actually Eggleston's 1970s Americana that inspired her to pick up a camera to begin with.

"The fact that he could take what looks like a mundane photograph but could elicit such a powerful emotional response from me," she recently wrote in an e-mail, "is what first got me interested in photography."

Prager has come quite a way since 2007 — from the pages of Communication Arts to the walls of New York City's Museum of Modern Art. Her work, in company with three other emerging artists, is in MoMA's New Photography 2010, an exhibition opening at the end of September.

This year, New Photography is about blurring lines — between stills and motion, between what's commercial and what's art. The U.S. debut of Prager's short film Despair, for example, marks the first time film has been included in the annual show. As curator Roxana Marcoci states in the news release:

"This younger group of artists... [is] creating pictures that often exist simultaneously as commercial assignment and artwork. They recognize photography to be a fluid medium."

Prager doesn't like rules. She has no formal training, as if that really matters, so it follows that she'd dabble in film just as her photography was getting noticed. After completing her most recent photo series, Week-End, she picked up a fancy Red camera and shot the four-minute, '50s-inspired chiller, Despair, featuring a luminous and rouge-clad Bryce Dallas Howard. Watch it here.

There is a story to the film — a rather dark one — but more than anything, Prager's film and photography are about aesthetics. Her imagination inhabits a colorful world of wigs and floral dresses. It's Eggleston 2.0: modernized, commercialized, with a Lynchian twist. In her words: "I like to mock up a sort of surreal, more colorful version of the world I live in. In that world anything can happen." For Prager, photography is a fluid medium, and nothing is black and white.

Jan Von Holleben turns gravity on its ear with his series of photos titled "Dreams of Flying"

By photographing from above and using the ground as a two-dimensional backdrop, Von Holleben creates a whimsical world where children fly through the air and perform unearthly feats. "Ladders are my second home!" he writes in an email, "Things just look so different from up there!"

This technique has come into vogue recently in commercials and music videos, from Oren Lavie's Her Morning Elegance to commercials for Amazon Kindle. But the most impressive application of what I'm going to call "overhead stop-motion animation" — because there doesn't seem to be an official term — is this music video for Coldplay's Strawberry Swing:

What in the what? Think about how much time and meticulous planning this must have taken and your brain will melt.

Want to give the still version a try? There's a Flickr pool of photos inspired by the Dreams of Flying series. You can add it to our Flickr pool, too.

3:15: What does it mean?

What does yours look like?