Pick of the day: 'Danger: Lions, tides, and barrels'

"Danger," Laura Brunow Miner writes. "Sometimes you taunt it towards you, whether through daredevil tricks, brave resolutions, or carelessness. And sometimes you get ambushed by it.

"In either case, the body is flooded with chemicals and hormones rarely experienced. You never know how you’re going to react to a threatening situation until you’re in one. Some crave the adrenaline rush, some despise it, but we’re all transformed by it."

Thus opens "Lions, Tides, and Barrels: 28 Stories of Energy and Emergency," a visual essay about danger that's posted on Miner's photo-story showcase, Pictory. The contributors' definitions of danger vary wildly, as the feature includes occasionally arresting images of a guy racing buffalo and a skier doing aerial tricks in the black of the night, of Palestinian activists demonstrating and a Tanzanian lion lunching, of snakes and firefighters and transatlantic voyagers and young boxers.

And then there's my favorite: this image of a pair of feet standing perilously at the edge of a cliff. It tells the beginning of what looks to be a thrilling story, but the end is yet to be written -- at least visually, for in the accompanying caption, the jumper-photographer, Whitney Johnson, writes: "I felt that even if my body were to crash into the ocean or break into a million pieces on the rocks, it would be OK. Will I ever feel that again?"