Smoke ring photographed at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada. The festival is a yearly gathering of 35,000 to 40,000 people, celebrating life, passion and art during one week in an immense dry lakebed called Black Rock Desert. The event takes place each last week of August. The culmination of the gahtering is the burning of a large human-shape figure in a giant bon-fire, hence the name of the festival.

One of the attractions during the 2005 edition was a cart on which were mounted a gas bottle and a narrow vertical pipe resembling a flare stack of an oil refinery. The speciality of the contraption is that it spits balls of fire which rapidly transform into metres-wide smoke rings.

See also the next images in this gallery.

[Photo by Tristan SAVATIER - more photos of the Burning Man Festival can be viewed on www.flickr.com and on www.burningman.com]