Mamoni Mandal, member of the Rapid Action Force (RAF), attends a training session at a police training school in Kolkata April 15, 2007. (Photo by Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

Children dressed as Santa Clause play with a soccer ball as they celebrate at their school ahead of Christmas in Chennai on December 23, 2021. (Photo by Arun Sankar/AFP Photo)

Students of the Ballet Academy prepare to perform during the school annual ceremony in Baghdad, Iraq, Friday, April 1, 2022. (Photo by Hadi Mizban/AP Photo)

Students attend the first day of in-person classes, at a flooded school due to high tide, in Macabebe, Pampanga province, Philippines on August 22, 2022. (Photo by Lisa Marie David/Reuters)

A girl plays a jump rope game at a school housing residents displaced by gang violence in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Wednesday, May 15, 2024. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

Do tears of joy look the same as ones of woe—or ones from chopping onions? In “The Topography of Tears,” the Los Angeles-based photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher explores the physical terrain of one hundred tears emitted during a range of emotional states and physical reactions. Using a Zeiss microscope with an attached digital camera, she captures the composition of tears enclosed in glass slides, magnified between 10x and 40x. “There are many factors that determine the look of each tear image, including the viscosity of the tear, the chemistry of the weeper, the settings of the microscope, and the way I process the images afterwards,” she says.

By making use of digital colour grading and composites, Romanian photographer Caras Ionut created these dreamy blue-themed landscapes. The work is even more impressive when you consider that Caras, who has been a mariner for the last 24 years, only picked up an interest in photography a few years ago. For more of his work, including fashion composites and semi-surrealist scapes.

A student from the General Yermolov Cadet School takes part in weapons training during a two-day field exercise near the village of Sengileyevskoye, just outside the south Russian city of Stavropol April 13, 2014. The General Yermolov Cadet School in the southern Russian city of Stavropol is a state-run institution that teaches military and patriotic classes in addition to a normal syllabus. (Photo by Eduard Korniyenko/Reuters)