Several years ago I captured morning sun streaming through the leaf of a pumpkin vine.

I recalled this image when I set out last week to photograph a leaf of romaine lettuce to illustrate an essay extolling the virtues of home-grown over store-bought vegetables.  This time I did not kneel in farm soil.  Instead, I set up a strobe light in our studio to imitate the sun.

Backyard vegetables brim with vitality compared with those transported across countries or over oceans.  In the same vein, with these photographs, I think the sun's glow eclipses that of its imitator.

With the chants of affordable-housing advocates echoing in my thoughts, I sped along Interstate 95 back to Boston.  The barren post-construction median strip of the highway was littered with bushes and trees sitting above ground with rootballs exposed, waiting to be planted.

"That's great," I thought, "after tearing up the earth, they are planting some trees."  But then my thoughts returned to the People to End Homelessness, who had demonstrated at the State House in Providence, Rhode Island.  How can you tell someone without a home that planting a tree along a highway is more important than their having a place to live?

Outside the State House, after delivering written pleas urging increased appropriations for supportive housing - a program that combines support services with permanent housing - the activists finished up their action with a unity clap.

"It's a tradition we learned from the Chicano movement in the Southwest,"  Duff Morton later told me via e-mail. "The sound symbolizes the heartbeat of the group when the group is acting together."

To begin with, he's in a full wet suit, and I'm up to my thighs in the Charles River, in Dover, Mass., wearing boots and chinos. Then, crouching down low to get close to environmentalist Christopher Swain and the water's surface, I had just dipped my elbow in, wetting my shirt. "That's a good sign," I cracked, knowing that the closer to the river and my subject I got, the more intimate the photo would be. I was not particularly concerned since I had a change of clothes in the car. Plus, my boots had traces of manure on them from the farm where I documented cows bound for Cuba, so I was looking for an opportunity to clean them.

After Swain headed off on his day's swim to draw attention to the need to clean up the river, I ran around to get up on the bridge to photograph him down river. A cluster of bicyclists stopped on the bridge peppered me with questions about the swimmer's sojourn. One looked at my soaked legs and commented: "Looks like you got a new water sport there."

Photographing the final manuscript draft of Henry David Thoreau's "Walden, or Life in the Woods", I really wanted to show the aged, rootsy nature of the paper. So I put my flash at an angle such that the light came streaming through the manuscript page, making it glow. Here is the word "Life" from the title page.

Jeffrey Cramer, curator of collections at The Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Mass., was in charge of the manuscript. The Institute, nestled in the woods near Walden Pond, is part of recording artist and former Eagles drummer Don Henley's Walden Woods Project. I asked Mr. Cramer how he got this job. He told me that he had heard by chance about the opening and was on his way to interview and said to himself: "If an Eagles' song comes on the radio before I get there, the job is mine." Sure enough, seconds later, on came the band's tune "Hotel California," the last strains trailing off as he pulled into the parking lot. I got chills as he told the tale.

It reminded me of covering indicted Panamanian dictator General Manuel Antonio Noriega.

It was 1988. I stayed in Panama City at the Hotel California. On my way across town in a cab, a song came over the radio. You can guess which one!

Last spring I tromped through Keown Orchards, in Sutton, Mass., following Artie Keown III as he used a harrow to prepare a field for planting. Today, blooming flowers fill the field. Artie's great-grandfather opened the farm as a peach and apple orchard in 1924. To stay profitable, acres of orchards have been cut down, replaced by market vegetables and flowers. While facing severe pressure by land-hungry home developers, the remaining Massachusetts farmers benefit by the proximity of large populations to sell their wares directly. "There are fewer of us, but we are more productive," says Keown.

Three months later, I photographed Rosa Cooper buying potatoes at a farmers' market in Boston. Now a senior citizen, Ms. Cooper was raised on a farm and helped her parents with the farmwork when she was a child.

I love farmers' markets. The fresh and vital food. The grateful and knowledgeable consumers. My brother and his wife are farmers in Pennsylvania. My sister-in-law could a fill a book with behind-the-scenes tales from her farmers' market in Williamsport.

At the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., in the Art and Ideas Center, from an assortment of legs, bodies and wings, my kids and I pieced together bugs according to the stated insect formula of six legs, three body parts and two antennas.

A few days later, I found myself photographing children's book illustrator Ralph Masiello at the National Guard Armory in Worcester, Mass., during a summer reading event for children who have parents serving in the Guard. He gave a lesson in drawing bugs.

Masiello, aka The Ickybugman, also showed some animal skulls on which he based the illustrations for The Skull Alphabet book. A vampire bat skull caught the attention of Alyssa and Kalie King, their mother Kristan, and their grandmother Marlene.

The girls' father, Scott King, is a recently activated National Guardsman. Regarding the hole in their family, Kristan says: "Obviously it's ... it's hard. It's an adjustment."

Next stop: Massachusetts Audubon Society's Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary, a 400 acre preserve tucked within the city limits of Worcester. I tracked this insect making its way across a brook, squeezing the shutter button as it pushed off with its legs on the water's surface tension.

I showed the image on the back of my digital camera to Education Coordinator Doug Kimball, who identified it as a water strider. As he explained how the bug locomotes using four of its six legs, he told me that every insect has six legs, three body parts and ...

Setting off to photograph the natural world in Weston, Mass. conservation land, just outside of Boston, echoes of the book I had just been reading to my kids at breakfast filtered into my thoughts. The book details how a score of successive life forms took up residence in a hole in a tree. Marveling at the interconnecteness of life, I noticed that a dangling branch drenched in morning sunlight looked like a lightning strike:

And that a swarm of bugs dancing above a lake evoked a snow flurry:

Finally, I spun my camera on its axis as I photographed trees and sky. The shutter was open for 1/8 of second, making for this planet Earth-like image.

Corporate photography is about creating moments. Photojournalism is about capturing moments. It's true that I can shape my reportage via lens selection, framing, angle, even exposure. Setting up images, however, is verboten. Here, corporate photographer Don West snapped an orchestrated shot for his client DHL. It was a Flag Day event where the shipping company donated American flags and 5,000 dollars to the Boston Renaissance Charter School, in Boston, Mass.

Researching what to shoot for an upcoming but not-yet-scheduled story on the conservation ethic in America, I found out about this: Customers who brought in their old air conditioners to Yale Appliance and Lighting in Boston could receive $75 instant rebates on the purchase of new, energy-efficient air conditioners. I went to investigate. Cars crammed with deal-seekers and their old air conditioners stretched out of the store's parking lot and down the street. Surrounded by boxes of energy-efficient air conditioners, customers in the line at left apply for their rebates while those at right wait to buy their new cooling devices. In the middle of shooting my cellphone chirped and it was my editor. The conservation ethic story had suddenly been scheduled and how soon could he see the pictures. I shot one more scene and then sped back to the office.