This is the remarkable moment a group of skydivers performed a world record breaking feat in honour of their friend who died while skydiving. Known as a “Bigway”, the daring jump involves 57 people holding hands in a predetermined design as they hurtle towards the ground, head first. After making the first shape, the group then break away before coming back together to form a second shape all in a single skydive. Captured using a GoPro camera by Alaskan skydiver, Ben Nelson, 36, the topsy-turvy footage shows the adrenalin junkies soaring through the air at around 160mph before banding together twice in mid-air, making the stunt a world first. (Photo by Ben Nelson/Caters News)

“David Doubilet (born 28 November 1946) is a well known underwater photographer known primarily for his work published in National Geographic Magazine. He was born in New York and started taking photos underwater at the young age of 12. He started with a Brownie Hawkeye in a rubber anesthesiologist's bag to keep the water out of the camera. During his summer holidays, he spent his time along the New Jersey coast. He later worked as a diver and photographer for the Sandy Hook Marine Laboratories in New Jersey. He also spent much time in the Caribbean. While a dive instructor in the Bahamas he found his motivation to capture the beauty of the sea and everything in it”. – Wikipedia. (Photo by David Doubilet/National Geographic)

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)

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)

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.

A Russian daredevil has captured a vertigo-inducing selfie – while standing on top of a Dubai skyscraper. Nineteen-year-old Alexander Remnev scaled the Princess Tower – the worlds tallest residential building at 1,350ft – before getting his camera out to take these stomach-churning pictures. Photo: He leans on the very top of the tower as he takes this vertigo-inducing picture. (Photo by Alexander Remnev/Caters News)

“Today, we take photography for granted. Anyone can take a photograph simply by pressing a button. Yet, it was not always so simple. The invention of photography was announced in 1839, but during its first fifty years taking a photograph was a complicated and expensive business. In 1888, all this was to change following the appearance of a camera that was to revolutionize photography. Popular photography can properly be said to have started 120 years ago with the introduction of the Kodak”. – The UK National Media Museum. Photo: Two men on the deck of a ship, about 1890. (Photo by Collection of National Media Museum/Kodak Museum)

“A happy camper has shown he has the world at his feet by capturing a series of breath-taking mountain views from his tent. Russian Photographer Oleg Grigoriev, 35, travels with little more than a tent and his camera taking snaps of the mountainous terrain of central Asia and Eastern parts of Europe. The adventurous lawyer, who lives in Ukraine, started camping in remote mountainous areas in 2007 but only came up with the concept of photographing views from his tent after a memorable trip to the Fann Mountains of Tajikistan”. – Caters News