A Saudi woman shops for Ramadan decorations to mark the beginning of the Holy Month of Ramadan in a local market in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on March 22, 2023. (Photo by Ahmed Yosri/Reuters)

Crews prepare hot air balloons for the Kentucky Derby Festival Great Balloonfest Rush Hour Race at Bowman Field on Friday, April 26, 2024. (Photo by Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal)

A hot air balloon rises in the sky during the International Hot-Air Balloon festival in Pokhara on December 27, 2024. With Nepal's snowy Himalayan peaks as a backdrop, the sky above Pokhara transformed into a vibrant canvas of colours for the country's first hot-air balloon festival. (Photo by Prakash Mathema/AFP Photo)

An aerial image shows hot air balloons, mostly made from recycled paper and tied with ropes, floating in the air during the annual hot air balloon festival, held since 1950 to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic holiday marking the end of Ramadan, in Wonosobo, Central Java, on April 2, 2025. (Photo by Devi Rahman/AFP Photo)

“Cyber Monsoon”, honorable mention in Places category. A torrential monsoon rain in Bhaktapur, Nepal. (© Anuar Patjane)

You might think Ysabel LeMay’s works are hyper-realistic paintings but they’re created through an innovative technique called photo fusion. The Quebec-born, U.S.-based artist takes hundreds of photographs for each piece, attunes the light and visual properties, then assembles one detail at a time in a painterly fashion to form a single composition. Each work takes 4 to 8 weeks on average.

Dog puppy “Sandy” protects against the rain with an umbrella fixed on her leash during a stroll in Rust, southern Germany, on May 26, 2013. (Photo by Patrick Seeger/AFP Photo)

“Wer in der Natur, der Kunst oder dem Menschen Gott nicht finden kann, der findet ihn nirgendwo” (Who cannot find God in the nature, the art or the person, that nowhere finds him). Photo: Hunstiger Hohlweg. (Photo by Norbert)