A girl flies a kite in the afternoon in Dhaka, Bangladesh on August 3, 2022. (Photo by Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

A girl goes to school just before sunrise in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, December 11, 2019. (Photo by Michael Probst/AP Photo)

Girls during a class at the Teire Irish dance school in Moscow, Russia on March 15, 2019. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/TASS)

A girl feeds a squirrel in Bolivar Square, in Caracas, Venezuela on June 4, 2024. (Photo by Gaby Oraa/Reuters)

“I was born in the United States in 1985. As early as I can remember I’ve been a “doodler”. From even the early days I’ve always loved strange, offbeat, beautiful, and slightly melancholy things. Something about the mixed grabbed me. My love for sketching carried on throughout my high school days. Which is when I took a small class on watercolor. Watercolor is what birthed my passion for mixing colors and how a color can tell a story. In year 2009 I discovered digital painting and my new found passion for the medium. It’s been the favored medium for the past years since. I’ve used online tutorials and videos to help me learn along the way and then in late 2011 I took a workshop called Becoming a Better Artist. The beginning of 2013 I won a class from The Art Department which will start this spring.”

A little girl seen waiting in a queue to participate in the Kumari Puja ritual in Kolkata, India on March 30, 2023. Kumari Puja is an Indian Hindu Tradition mainly celebrated during the Durga Puja / Basanti Puja / Navratri according to Hindu calendar. Kumari actually describes a young virgin girl from the age 1 to 16 who is getting worshipped during the transition of Ashtami / Navami tithi of Durga Puja / Navaratri according to Hindu mythology. (Photo by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Reuters photographer Siegfried Modola gained access to a circumcision ceremony in rural Kenya for young girls of the Pokot tribe, in Baringo County. Here: a Pokot girl, covered in animal skins, walks to a place where she will rest after being circumcised in a tribal ritual in a village about 80 kilometres from the town of Marigat in Baringo County, October 16, 2014. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)