The policeman raises his pistol in a melee of protesters, the gun barrel flashes and a young man falls onto his back clutching his chest – 60 seconds of video caught on camera at the height of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

It's one thing to say the world is drowning in plastic. It's another to show it.

Video journalist Marco Trujillo sat on his hotel balcony, eyes fixed on the silhouette of a supertanker in the Strait of Gibraltar, watching for the splash of an anchor chain or the smallest sign of movement.

Before I flew into Marsh Harbour to take pictures of Hurricane Dorian for Reuters I spoke to my cousin, a fire and rescue worker in the Bahamas, who gave me a mystifying piece of advice just before he hung up: Make sure you take some rope.

One day Reuters photographer Phil Noble was hunched behind the goal line in the northern English city of Manchester, thousands of soccer fans braying behind his back.

(Backstory is a series of reports showing how Reuters journalists work and the standards under which they operate.)

The picture shows a group of young men sitting on the floor in a bedroom in western Denmark, two of them checking phones, one smoking a shisha pipe, all of them killing time as they wait to see if they will be sent back to Iran.

Pierre Mambele was never credited with telling the story of Congo's never-ending crises. But the news would often have gone unheard without him.

On the afternoon of July 1, before protesters in Hong Kong trashed the city's legislature and riot police countered with tear gas, there was a moment that captured the city's state of flux.

(Backstory is a series of reports showing how Reuters journalists work and the standards under which they operate)