Your Shot photographer Carolyn Cheng photographed the waters of Shark Bay in Australia from an aerial perspective. She writes, "This image spoke to me the most, as to my delight, the waves look like white flames emanating from the water or, alternatively and metaphorically, like the open and curious fingers or tentacles of an exploratory organism."
Your Shot photographer Carolyn Cheng photographed the waters of Shark Bay in Australia from an aerial perspective. She writes, "This image spoke to me the most, as to my delight, the waves look like white flames emanating from the water or, alternatively and metaphorically, like the open and curious fingers or tentacles of an exploratory organism."
Photograph by Carolyn Cheng, National Geographic Your Shot

Your best photos of the week, January 25, 2019

Each week, our editors choose stunning photos submitted by members of Your Shot, National Geographic's photo community.

Some might say it all started with a photograph made in 1932 as a photographer aimed his 35-millimeter camera through a fence. A man jumped across a puddle while the light, form, and timing perfectly came together in perfect harmony with one click of his shutter. That was it. It was Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” a term poetically coined as the moment when the photographic stars align for a photographer pressing their shutter.

This, by no means, was the birth of photography. This term, however, arguably changed the course of photography. Cartier-Bresson’s photographic eye set a standard that required the bare minimum of camera equipment and immortalized fleeting moments to mere fractions of a second. Without knowing it,

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