National Geographic PHOTO GALLERY

LIONS IN LINES  Your Shot photographer Torie Hilley didn't think she'd be able to see anything interesting through the tall grass while on a safari in Zambia. "Then this pride of lions came walking toward us," she says, "taking advantage of the road to travel on. They, too, seemed they were tired of the tall grass swatting at their faces!"

WATCHFIRE   A Memorial Day Watchfire burns in Syracuse, New York. Your Shot photographer Stefani Reynolds explains the practice: "After a battle, there was an age-old tradition of building a large fire, in the hopes that it would guide lost soldiers back to where they needed to be. Today, the Memorial Day Watchfire honors that tradition, and those who served, by respectfully retiring American flags that can no longer be used."

SUPERSTORM  "The sight of this monstrous supercell was the stuff of dreams to me," says Your Shot photographer Will Eades. Orginially from Australia, he writes, "I had travelled from the other side of the world to see the biggest and most photogenic weather on the planet, and now that I was here bracing against the outflow as this mammoth storm rampaged across the Great Plains, all I could do was encourage the beast and yell into the wind."

BROTHER BEARS Two bear cubs play in a forest of the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine. Your Shot photographer Volodymyr Burdiak says he wasn't expecting to see them emerge from the bushes, and he had only a few seconds to get this photograph before they ran back into the woods with their mother.

STRIKE A POSE Dancers-in-training pose in a hallway of the Cuban National Ballet School. With 3,000 students studying dance within its walls, it is the largest ballet school in the world.