This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

The golden light at dusk and dawn in the Kalahari is amazing and can enhance the mood of a scene greatly. On this particular morning in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the rising sun was filtered by an ancient forest of camel thorn acacia trees, with a herd of springbok gazelles in attendance to complete the scene.

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

A gray wolf rests at Wolf Haven International, a wolf sanctuary in Washington State.

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

"Suddenly he just jumped in!" says photographer Michael Aw. Sarmin Tangadji, the Papua police officer who escorted the photographic team to where the sharks congregate, "was so excited to see them up close." Aw shares that excitement when it comes to diving with a dozen whale sharks: "You are sandwiched in, sharks ahead and behind, but you want to be there," he says. "They make eye contact with you and then charge by. It blows your mind."

See more pictures from the October 2011 feature story "Sharing With Sharks."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Animal Pictures

This snowy owl was captured during a snowstorm. Unlike most owls, which are nocturnal, snowy owls are diurnal—they hunt and are active both day and night.

(This photo was submitted to My Shot.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

The small town where I live (Asiago plateau, Italy) is shrouded in fog in this image taken from the top of a mountain.

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot? Send it to us for possible publication in National Geographic.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Johan Kuhmunen, with his dog Cammu, lives in Sweden, but the summertime range for his family's herd crosses into Norway. The Sami tradition of learning from the elders is an important part of reindeer herding, and knowledge is passed down from generation to generation and not learned in books.

See more pictures from the November 2011 feature story, "Sami: The People Who Walk With Reindeer."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Evoking a scene from biblical times, caravans arrive at the salt mines of Lake Asele, 381 feet below sea level. For centuries salt blocks, called amole, were used throughout Ethiopia as money.

See more pictures from the January 2012 feature story "The Salt and the Earth".

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

A lone shikara boat slices through the peace and tranquility of Dal Lake, the oarsman reflecting on a better tomorrow to come.

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot? Send it to us for possible publication in National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

For generations people in the region have marked cave walls with stenciled handprints. These prints were made with clay-based paint, but in other caves, crimson stains tell the story of a bloody initiation ritual for young men.

See more pictures from the February 2012 feature story "Last of the Cave People."

This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

A man climbs at sunset in Peak District National Park, England.

(This photo was submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot? Send it to us for possible publication in National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Walking along one of the many canals in the ancient city of Suzhou, a stall worker mounts her bike for her commute home, creating a pleasing silhouette set against bold Chinese writing and illuminations on a centuries-old dwelling. Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, China

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot of a city? Send it to us, tag it "cities," and see if we select it for publication in the March 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Against the soaring backdrop of Arizona's Vermilion Cliffs, the 1929 Navajo Bridge, now used for foot traffic, crosses the Colorado River beside its 1995 counterpart.

See more pictures from the February 2012 feature story "Rock of Ages."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Floral flourishes decorate Nurzhol Boulevard, or "Radiant Path."

See more pictures from the February 2012 feature story "Tomorrowland."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Kambala is a simple sport played in parts of Karnataka, India. The “track” used for Kambala is a paddy field filled with slush. It is a race of buffaloes controlled by a whip-lashing farmer. This is a shot taken at Vandar village near Mangalore.

(This photo and caption were submitted to My Shot.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Djibouti's Lake Assal is one of the world's saltiest lakes. Intense heat and strong winds fuel rapid evaporation, leaving a bathtub ring of minerals around the lake's shore.

See more pictures from the January 2012 feature story "The Salt and the Earth."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

On a moonlit night, herders bring the reindeer into temporary tarp-enclosed corrals called gárdi to separate the pregnant females from the rest.

See more pictures from the November 2011 feature story, "Sami: The People Who Walk With Reindeer."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Overhead snapshot of the Belgrade riverbank—summer love, I guess!

(This photo and caption were submitted to My Shot. Have a great shot of a city? Send it to us, tag it "cities," and see if we select it for publication in the March 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Elephants have miles of unbroken savanna to roam inside Uganda's Queen Elizabeth Park, where their numbers total 2,500, a dramatic rise after heavy poaching in the 1980s. Outside the preserve villagers kill elephants that trample and eat crops, though attacks have diminished with the digging of trenches to protect fields from wild trespassers.

See more pictures from the November 2011 feature story "Rift in Paradise."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Aerial view of Iguazu Falls, Brazil-Argentina border

(This photo was submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot? Send it to us for possible publication in National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Lake Malawi, Africa. A stargazer looks into the endless cosmos as waves lap along a beach in Southern Malawi.

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Icelandic horses are out all year, even through the winter. I captured these in-foal mares in southern Iceland in December 2011.

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot? Send it to us for possible publication in National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

A farmer is beginning his day, walking along the rice terraces at dawn.

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot. Have a great shot? Send it to us for possible publication in National Geographic magazine.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

Golden fields in Bandarban, one of the hill districts in southeastern Bangladesh

(This photo was submitted to My Shot.)

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

For a thousand years, music and ceremony have celebrated the Christian Gospel in Westminster Abbey in London. As the place where generations of English kings and queens have been married, crowned, and buried, this great medieval building embodied King James's cherished fusion of glory and regal authority—a visual and aural richness of which the new Bible was to be an integral part.

See more pictures from the December 2011 feature story, "The Bible of King James."

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This Month in Photo of the Day: Travel Photos

While island hopping around the Bahamas in a Cessna C172 aircraft, I made this aerial of a Curtiss C-46 that ditched on November 15, 1980. It crashed while it was on a drug smuggling mission for the Colombian Medellín drug cartel and lies in shallow water east of the Norman's Cay airport in the Exumas, Bahamas. My preflight Internet research paid off!

(This photo and caption were submitted to Your Shot.)

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