The standards that TIME sets for its reporting and writing apply equally to the pictures that illustrate its stories. When the editors decided on this week's cover story on the U.S. Government's biggest land sale of the century, Picture Researcher Julia Richer began by putting together a list of 25 property sites across the country that seemed to have photographic potential. She also talked with New York Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, who wrote the story, and asked picture researchers in TIME'S news bureaus for detailed recommendations about the sites. Richer then narrowed the list to twelve and matched them to photographers who she thought would be especially interested in each area.

The most obvious match-up was Freelance Photographer Baron Wolman, who shot the opening photo of the Coast Guard light station at Point Sur in California. Last year Wolman, who has his own Cessna, published California from the Air: The Golden Coast. He knew Point Sur well and says, "I fell in love with it again." Photographer Steve Liss had a less aesthetic vista at Bucks Harbor, Me.: a surplus airbase. After checking every conceivable camera angle on the ground, he concluded reluctantly that he, like Wolman, would have to fly. "I'm petrified of planes," says Liss, "especially small ones."

For Werner Stoy, who chartered a helicopter to photograph Fort DeRussy, on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, the problem was not trees but dense commercial high-rise developments surrounding the land, which made it difficult for his pilot to maneuver. David Falconer was luckier. He expected visibility problems when he rented a plane to shoot pictures of Oregon's Bald Mountain Lookout. But shortly before he arrived, light broke through the soup-thick clouds just long enough.

Dan Morrill's assignment was 1,300 acres of prairie land near Joliet, Ill. "The prairie is beautiful to a botanist or an agronomist, but it's difficult to show to the average person pictorially," says Morrill. "The beauty is in the details, not the overall look of the land." James Balog, who specializes in nature photography, was stumped at first by the arid terrain of the 280 acres near the Keyhole Reservoir in Wyoming. Then, on a hunch, he waited for nightfall, when a rising moon provided an intriguing mix of shadow and light. The result, like the five other pictures chosen for the story, shows none of the second thoughts, false starts and doubts that preceded the final image. And that is just as it is supposed to be.