A French rock climber named Jean Michel Casanova scales the 172-meter-high steel derrick of the Bailong Elevator, also known as Bailong Sky Ladder, with his bare hands at the Wulingyuan Scenic Area on June 28, 2023 in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province of China. (Photo by Deng Daoli/VCG via Getty Images)

A colonly of honey bees swarms one of the traffic lights on 41st Street and Broadway on May 1st, 2024. Bees would frequest the area, even finding residence in the flowerbeds rooftop of WeWork offices at 1460 Broadway in prior seasons. (Photo by Derek French/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

What do superheroes do when they’re not busy fighting bad guys and saving the world from destruction? Perhaps they’re drawing strength alone in the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. That’s the premise of French photographer Benoit Lapray‘s photo-manipulation series “The Quest for the Absolute.”

French photographer and director Romain Laurent started making portrait-based GIFs as a way to produce work outside his commercial jobs, a spontaneous project that would encourage him to produce consistently for himself rather than clients.

Alain Robert, known as the French “Spiderman” climbs the “First” tower, the highest building in France on May 10, 2012 in Paris La Defense, Hauts de Seine, France. (Foto by DPA/AP Photo/Michel Euler)

People sit near a fully loaded in Madama near the border with Lybia on January 1, 2015. French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian paid a surprise visit to northern Niger on January 1, to visit a base being built to combat the growing flow of weapons and jihadists from neighbouring Libya. Le Drian travelled from Chad to Madama, a desert outpost about 100 kilometres from Libya, where he saw in the New Year with troops at a French base. Madama is situated on the route used by jihadists and arms smugglers in southern Libya to reach northern Mali and Niger. (Photo by Dominique Faget/AFP Photo)

French twins Thomas and Vincent (L) Seris take the tram in Bordeaux, November 12, 2014. Born with Xeroderma Pigmentosum (XP), the twins cannot be exposed to the sun and its ultraviolet (UV) light, which could provoke precocious cancers due to an autosomal recessive genetic disorder of DNA repair. Colloquially referred to as Children of the Night (Les Enfants de la Lune) the Seris twins are among 70 to 80 people in France who suffer from the genetic defect. The French association “Les Enfants de la Lune” reports that there are between five and ten thousand such cases in the world. Thomas and Vincent have been testing a new protective mask for the last year which is transparent and ventilated and developed by several hospitals in France. (Photo by Regis Duvignau/Reuters)

Paris authorities began draining the Canal Saint-Martin, a popular waterway that attracts tourists and revelers in the French capital's trendy northeastern 10th arrondissement, for the first time in 14 years, Paris, January 5, 2016. (Photo by Christophe Geyres/SIPA Press/Newscom)