Nine years ago, Tom Carter traveled from San Francisco to China, responding to a job posting that turned out to be a scam. He managed to find another job as a teacher, and saved enough money to embark on a 56,000 km trip through all of China's 33 provinces that lasted two years. Carrying a camera – just a a 4-megapixel point-and-shoot – Carter captured some amazing images of the widely varying landscape, people, and architecture across the nation. Photo: Buddhist pilgrim family from Sichuan. (Photo by Tom Carter via The Atlantic)

Vivi Mac, an amazing artist from France who can use virtually any kind of food to create detailed celebrity portraits. Although she has yet to display her ephemeral masterpieces in an proper art gallery, Vivi Mac has already made a name for herself online.

Actress Morena Baccarin poses for a portrait backstage at the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on January 15, 2012 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images)

An artwork entitled “Are you still mad at me?” by John Isaacs is displayed at the Death: A Self-portrait exhibition at the Wellcome Collection on November 14, 2012 in London, England. The exhibition showcases 300 works from a unique collection by Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer from Chicago, devoted to the iconography of death. The display highlights art works, historical artifacts, anatomical illustrations and ephemera from around the world and opens on November 15, 2012 until February 24, 2013. (Photo by Peter Macdiarmid)

Charlotte Bridgeman poses for a series of triptych portraits during New York Fashion Week February 6, 2014. Bridgeman, from Australia, is attending her second fashion week. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

German photographer Tobias Lang had a brilliant idea, he started photographing his friends and their pets and suddenly folks from all over the world where asking him to capture them too. Check out his Facebook page to see. Tobias is in the process of putting together a coffee table book of his impressive collection. Photo: Pet owner Isabel with her blind housecat, “Captain Jack”. (Photo by Tobias Lang)

Merit: A Night at Deadvlei. The night before returning to Windhoek, we spent several hours at Deadveli. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the sand dunes in the distance, but the skies were still dark enough to clearly see the milky way and magellanic clouds. Deadveli means “dead marsh. The camelthorn trees are believed to be about 900 years old, but have not decomposed because the environment is so dry. (Photo and caption by Beth McCarley/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

While communism, collectivism, worms, dry rot and casual looting failed to destroy the majestic wooden churches of Russia, it may be ordinary neglect that finally does them in. Dwindled now to several hundred remaining examples, these glories of vernacular architecture lie scattered amid the vastness of the world’s largest country. Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” (White Sea Publishing; $132) is the result. Covering thousands of miles, Mr. Davies described how he and the writer Matilda Moreton tracked down the survivors from among the thousands of onion-domed structures built after Prince Vladimir converted to Christianity in 988.