“Festive preparation”. Baghnapara, Bardhaman, West Bengal, India. Two girls prepare for the Gajan festival. They will perform a play based on Indian mythology. (Photo by Krishnasis Ghosh)

Kourtney Roy makes eerie self-portraits in desolate yet dramatic locations – with wigs and wardrobe straight out of 1950s melodrama. In these shots, from her “Enter as Fiction – California” series, she plays characters caught in desolate, often abandoned settings. (Photo by Kourtney Roy/Galerie Catherine et André Hug/The Guardian)

Wildlife photographer Danté Fenolio has headed into areas untouched by sunlight – deep seas, caves and underground – and found creatures that are exploding with colour. Here: The golden harlequin toad has vanished from the wild, and only a small number live on in captivity. A fungus caused them, and many other amphibians, to die out in their home in Central America. (Photo by Danté Fenolio/The Guardian/Johns Hopkins University Press)

“Danger in the mud” – a crocodile at Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe. The grand prize winner. (Photo by Jens Cullmann/World Nature Photography Awards 2022)

In this photo taken on Monday, August 5, 2019, a family watches explosions at a military ammunition depot near the city of Achinsk in eastern Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region, in Achinsk, Russia. Russian officials say powerful explosions at a military depot in Siberia left 12 people injured and one missing and forced over 16,500 people to leave their homes. (Photo by Dmitry Dub/AP Photo)

Shooting star by Tony Wu, US/Japan. Winner, underwater. The electrifying reproductive dance of a giant sea star. As the surrounding water filled with sperm and eggs from spawning sea stars, Wu faced several challenges. Stuck in a small, enclosed bay with only a macro lens for photographing small subjects, he backed up to squeeze the undulating sea star into his field of view. The dancing posture of spawning sea stars rising and swaying may help release eggs and sperm, or may help sweep the eggs and sperm into the currents where they fertilise together in the water. Kinko Bay, Japan. (Photo by Tony Wu/Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

A boy swims in Chao Phraya River as he helps to place a Krathong, or a “floating basket”, in the water amid a yearly festival during which rafts of neatly folded banana leaves, decorated with flowers, candles and incense, are offered to thank the water goddess for good luck and for using her water to grow crops and support all life, in Bangkok, Thailand on November 8, 2022. (Photo by Chalinee Thirasupa/Reuters)

Workers tend green onion plants among nearly 1,000 acres of terracing in fields in the Majalengka Regency of West Java in Indonesia in July 2021. (Photo by Andika Oky Arisandi/Solent News)