Keith Jones focused his medical-grade intraoral camera and lens that he normally uses in his dental practice on flora encased in ice for this series of photographs. Jones captured the images on his property south of Clinton Lake. The close-up shots reveal the natural world in ways rarely seen by the naked eye.

Although Keith Jones is not a professional photographer, he utilizes a camera nearly every day in the workplace.

The Lawrence dentist employs an intraoral medical lens for taking pictures of teeth fractures when needing the magnified images for insurance claims, for instance.

So when an ice storm hit in mid-December, Jones got the idea to trade the bite of a bicuspid for the frigid nip of ice forming on branches.

“I stepped outside and took a couple pictures of a tree during daylight, and they were pretty spectacular,” Jones says.

The 55-year-old Jones experimented with various techniques, discovering that the images were most vivid when snapped at night using artificial lighting.

“At one point I had someone holding a flashlight on it while I focused. Other times I got a little headlamp I would use,” he recalls.

Jones noticed the technique made for particularly vivid shots involving the buds on the apple trees that reside in his backyard.

“During the day with the naked eye, they look brown. When you shoot them at night with a flash, it brings all that color out,” he says.

Jones calls the series “Destructive Beauty.” He has about 100 of these pictures in his collection – more of these can be found online at www.ljworld.com.

“In dentistry, we work in a microscopic world,” he adds. “With the precision in the minute things we do, we get very detail-oriented when it comes to looking at things. So when I see things in nature, I notice the real small things more than I do the whole picture.”