Revellers take part in the Els Enfarinats festival, in the town of Ibi near Alicante, Spain, Saturday December 28, 2019. For about 200-years the inhabitants of Ibi annually celebrate with a battle using flour, eggs and firecrackers, outside the city town hall. (Photo by Alberto Saiz/AP Photo)

Dozens of hot air balloons fill the sky on the second day of the 2024 International Balloon Festival (FIG) in Leon, Mexico, 16 November 2024. (Photo by Luis Ramirez/EPA)

A hot-air balloon flies over Metropolitan Park during the International Hot-Air Balloon Festival in Leon, state of Guanajuato, Mexico, on November 16, 2024. (Photo by Henry Romero/Reuters)

An installation with a copy of a tank is seen at a villager's house in the village of Vits, Belarus November 8, 2016. (Photo by Vasily Fedosenko/Reuters)

“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)