With this well-composed shot, Fiona Brophy captures the emotions of a young girl anticipating a dive.  The diver’s parallel position to the waterline adds directional movement to this still image.

View this week’s You Witness slideshow here.

Conan Whitehouse has used flash to freeze the movements of this Bboy during a competition in Sydney.

View this week’s You Witness slideshow here.

You Witness contributor Jeff Bachner tells the story of following his passion of photography.

My journey to change careers started in November of 2005. My wife had been very ill for about a year. The stress of dealing with that and the everyday pressures of running a high volume luxury automobile dealership became overwhelming and I lost my job. I needed something to help keep my sanity during the remainder of my wife’s recovery.

Amazingly, life always gives you what you need if you just open your eyes and look for it. I received an email from Kodak informing me that they were introducing some new products in the Soho area of Manhattan. In addition, they had hired some top pro photographers to give lectures that they called “Master Classes.”

The first lecture I attended was given by famed tennis photographer June Harrison. We struck up a friendship and June eventually became my mentor. The most important advice she gave me was to take photos every day. That’s exactly what I did.

A few months later I was rehired by the dealership where I previously worked. It soon became clear to me that my prior enthusiasm for the automobile business was gone. I felt that photography might fill that void if I could just figure out a way to make a living in the field. So, with encouragement from my mentor, I kept shooting, developing my eye for composition, and my skill with the camera. Part of my education was looking at what other photographers were doing. That’s how I found Reuters’ website and discovered You Witness News.

During the next year I started to submit photos. In July of 2007 I managed to secure a press credential for the Coney Island Summer Concert Series. As I snapped my photos I observed how other photographers were working. One in particular, Steve Mack, impressed me with his professionalism. I watched him pull out a laptop, edit his photos, and start submitting them to his agency. He was kind enough to answer my questions and explain his work flow. At that point I was hooked and knew that photojournalism was going to be my niche. The following week I was back with my laptop and started submitting my images to You Witness News.

You can’t imagine the elation I felt when I saw my first photo published in the You Witness News Weekly Showcase. Then, week after week, my photos continued to appear. It gave me validation of my photographic skill and the confidence I needed to keep going. Other photographers I spoke with thought I was crazy to keep submitting my work without payment* but, instinctively, I saw it as an opportunity to build a portfolio that would prove invaluable in securing paid work.

My instincts were right. Using my You Witness portfolio I secured a press credential for the AVP Volleyball Tournament in Coney Island in August, 2007. I felt that my work was good enough to sell so I sent emails to local newspapers and Volleyball enthusiast publications. Although all of them wrote back saying they already had people covering the event, Brooklyn Paper editor Gersh Kuntzman expressed an interest in seeing my work saying that he was always looking for photographers. When I sent him my You Witness portfolio he responded that he couldn’t pay anything close to what I was probably used to getting. Well, I’d never received a penny for any of my photos so, whatever he offered was fine with me.

We signed a Freelance Agreement and I started to receive assignments which I completed in my spare time. I was still working full time at the car dealership but that ended when I found myself unemployed again in December, 2007.

February of 2008 I got a call from the NY Daily News offering to purchase my photo of Miss Brooklyn, Leigh Taylor-Smith that they’d seen on the front page of the Brooklyn Paper.  During the next few months the Daily News purchased other photos I submitted to them and Photo Editor Mike Lipack eventually offered me a Freelance contract. It’s a dream come true that I don’t think would have been possible without You Witness News.

View a showcase of Jeff’s images here.

*Any You Witness images that are used on the Reuters pictures wire are paid for.

Daphne Tolis sent in a series of pictures from the riots in Greece, with this one my pick of the bunch for its simple use of three elements to convey the scene: the smoke, the fire extinguisher and the masked riot policeman.

View this week’s You Witness slideshow here.

Two hours after the news broke about a military jet crashing into San Diego homes, I received an email to You Witness from Ron Belanger with a link to dramatic photos of the incident. Here is Ron’s account of events.

I was working at home near MCAS Miramar in San Diego mid-day Monday, when I heard the unmistakable “pop… pop…” sound of ejection seats firing nearby but hadn’t heard the jet’s engines. As a retired Navy pilot and aircraft accident investigator I suddenly realized this meant that a pilotless aircraft and ejection seats would soon be coming down. I took cover under my desk then heard a deafening sound as the plane crashed and the house shook violently.

When I ran outside there was a large black cloud of smoke rising and I could feel the heat. I tried to call 911 but the line was already busy as other witnesses called in the emergency. I grabbed my shoes and camera and ran down to the scene which is five houses over from mine. Several of us asked neighbors if there was anyone in the house. Since that wasn’t known, we went down the right side, where part of the house was still standing, shouting out to anyone inside but there was no answer… just the roar of the fire and the sound of small explosions. We couldn’t go in because the house was fully involved in flames at every opening we found. As we were checking out the back yard, a propane tank from the camper which had been pushed into the house exploded. We quickly retreated since there was nothing we could do.

Pilots and investigators who arrive early on an accident scene are trained to document the scene and take photos if possible so that’s what I did. Copies of the pics are being provided to the accident investigators and public safety agencies.

We received Ron’s images shortly afterwards and quickly had our senior photographer contact him and negotiate a payment and rights of usage. A little over an hour later, the images were on the Reuters Pictures wire and sent around the world. Ron has received calls from friends and family globally after they saw his images online and in print.

A selection of other You Witness images used on the wire can be found here.

Photography is so often about being on the lookout for that strange moment and being ready to capture it, which is exactly what Kyungwon Kuk has done in this image from South Korea.

View this week’s You Witness slideshow here.

A Congolese refugee in a tattered baseball cap, worn clothes and blue flip-flops begged me for a cigarette at Kibati, a camp for 65,000 people displaced by fighting in eastern Congo.

I scolded him, saying smoking was bad for his health, as if anything could be worse for your health than living in this conflict-racked corner of Democratic Republic of Congo.

Machine gun fire erupted nearby and people dived for cover, ducking into rows of flimsy tents made from torn sheets of white plastic stretched over sticks.

"Mister, mister, come lie down in here," a voice called from one tent as bullets hummed nearby like an electrical current.

I snapped a few blurry pictures of people running before crawling through the curtain door of the tent, where a man and two children huddled on the ground. I kneeled above them and took a few more photographs.

"When you hear gunshots, if you lie flat, you can be OK, but if you stay up like that, paff!" said the man, Boniface Buhoro, a tailor who had fled weeks of combat further north in an area now controlled by anti-government Tutsi rebels.

Several people had already been killed by gunfire in this refugee camp in North Kivu province at the foot of Nyiragongo volcano on the front lines between Congo’s army and advancing rebels. At least two more were killed in the next few days.

For 45 minutes, I lay with my legs intertwined with Buhoro’s, his three-year-old son Sadiki wedged between us.

Army boots crunched past outside over black lava rock as soldiers fired their weapons at full stride.

At first we assumed rebels were attacking, but in fact drunken army troops were fighting each other, shooting randomly.

In the panic, soldiers went from tent to tent robbing refugees who had already lost almost everything, typical behavior for the badly paid and poorly disciplined army.

"Every day, something like this happens. They rob and steal and kill us or rape the girls. We don’t even have anything to eat, but they take what they want," said Buhoro.

I crawled outside as things calmed down.

The man who’d asked me for a cigarette lay face down.

"He’s dead already -- stress," said someone in the small crowd around the body. He had apparently died of heart seizure.

This is how many Congolese die: if not by the gun, then from conflict-induced illnesses, preventable diseases or hunger in a resource-rich but shattered nation lacking infrastructure.

More than five million people have died, most from lack of access to food or basic health, during a decade of fighting and upheaval in Congo, according to aid agencies. This makes Congo's enduring conflict the deadliest since World War Two.

I spent two years in Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda from 2002 to 2004, covering the regional war that engulfed much of central Africa. The day I took shelter with Boniface was the first on my latest trip to report again on Congo's seemingly unending cycle of violence.

Most of the victims perish far from sight, deep in the bush.

This time, death seemed all around.

Driving to the front line early one morning, mist hung over the road and smoke from Nyiragongo volcano darkened the sky.

Marking the first rebel position were the bodies of two government soldiers, a bullet through each of their skulls.

Traveling north later, I reached the hilltop village of Kirumba, where local Mai-Mai militiamen had clashed with government troops fleeing the Tutsi rebel advance.

The army quickly buried their dead, but the Mai-Mai corpses were set on fire by beer-drinking troops.

I found them the next morning, fat still bubbling on one charred corpse, its genitals cut off. Another body had an umbrella stabbed into its face. Soldiers joked and laughed.

Back near Kibati camp, I followed a funeral procession into a sun-dappled banana grove. A tiny purple casket containing the body of eight-month old Alexandrine Kabitsebangumi, who had died from cholera, was being lowered into the dark earth.

The grove was filled with graves. As women sang a haunting hymn, the mourners moved aside, allowing me to photograph.

There’s no joy getting a good picture from a baby’s funeral.

Another victim, another memory, another ghost.

After two weeks, I left Congo, crossing into Rwanda.

As my car climbed the steep hills, providing stunning scenic views back into Congo -- that beautiful, terrible place -- I passed another procession carrying a body on a bamboo stretcher.

I didn’t stop. I just kept driving.