Virginia Woolf

A seahorse clutches a discarded cotton swab to ride the oceans currents near Sumbawa Island, Indonesia. “It’s a photo that I wish didn’t exist but now that it does I want everyone to see it,” wrote photographer Justin Hofman. “What started as an opportunity to photograph a cute little sea horse turned into one of frustration and sadness as the incoming tide brought with it countless pieces of trash and sewage.”

Every October, about 18 million macaroni penguins nest on hillsides and cliffs of Antarctic and subantarctic shorelines. Macaronis have the largest population of all penguins.

A mother panda tends to her infant at Bifengxia Panda Center in Sichuan Province, China. This photo appeared in an August 2016 story about China's efforts to raise pandas and release them into the wild.

A monk dresses for a black hat dance inside Gangtey Monastery at the Black-Necked Crane Festival in Bhutan. The black hat dance has mysterious origins in Tibet as the dance was once secret and used to pass white and black magic. High monks preform the dance in Bhutan to protect good and destroy evil by severing demon spirits. The festival celebrates the auspicious migration of the graceful black-necked crane from Tibet to Bhutan in the winter months.

This bumper car track was part of an amusement park in Pripyat, Ukraine. Along with the rest of the city, it is now an abandoned relic. Pripyat is a ghost town, left behind in the wake of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl power plant, located just a few miles away. From the time of its founding in 1970 until it was evacuated on April 27, 1986, the “nuclear city”—built to serve the nearby power plant—had grown to a population of nearly 50,000.

A climber skis past pools on Ruth Glacier in Alaska's Denali National Park.

Photographers capture the Aldeyjarfoss waterfall as it crashes through the route’s rocky cliffs.

After a flight delay at New York's LaGuardia Airport, Your Shot photographer Steven Serio found himself on a nearly empty plane back to his home in Chicago. With plenty of room to strech out, Stephen was able to capture the illuminated clouds below the plane's wing and the twinkling stars above. Braced against the window to hold his camera steady, he set the shutter speed slow enough to capture the vista while making sure the scene was sharp.

A sedated Arabian oryx in a trailer at 777 Ranch in Texas awaits transport to another facility. Extinct in the wild, Arabian oryxes are bred, bought, and sold on many Texas ranches. Michael Rann, the nephew of the ranch’s owner, cares for the ranch’s 6,000 animals. Even though Rann says he realizes that hunting fees are the ranch’s primary source of income, losing animals to hunters can be painful. “I wish that the animals I raised weren’t shot,” he says. “But it is what it is. I know what I signed up for.”

Driving on the road across the Gaspésie National Parc in the winter of 2016 I came across a couple of moose. A calf and his mother were licking the salt off the road, freshly dropped from a salt truck to prevent icing on the road. As I got closer, the calf got spooked and disappeared into the forest but the mother kept licking that delicious salt! I call this picture salt addiction.

A sled dog team competes in Alaska’s 2007 Anchorage Fur Rendezvous races.

Fishing boats wait at the ready in Rusticoville, an unincorporated area of Prince Edward Island, where many people still make their living off the land.