San Diego Ballet School students wear protective masks backstage during a performance of “The Nutcracker”, presented by the San Diego Ballet in a drive-in performance at a parking lot in San Diego, California, December 5, 2020. (Photo by Bing Guan/Reuters)

The competition is run by Royal Observatory Greenwich sponsored by Insight Investment and in association with BBC Sky at Night Magazine. This year astrophotographers from 91 countries sent in more than 4,200 spectacular entries. Here: The Milky Way rises above an isolated lighthouse in Tasmania. Shot by James Stone of Australia. (Photo by James Stone/Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2018)

A festival goer cools down with fresh water while taking part in the Hellfest metal music festival on June 17, 2022 in Clisson, western France. (Photo by Loic Venance/AFP Photo)

Well before Corey Arnold ever thought about photography, he fished. As a child, he dressed as a fisherman for four consecutive Halloweens, and once brought a dead 3-foot Mako shark to school for show-and-tell. He knew he wanted to be a professional fisherman, even if he didn’t understand what that actually meant.

Shoppers walk past crocodiles for sale at a market in Bata on February 3, 2015. Markets in Equatorial Guinea sell a variety of animals including pangolins, monkeys and crocodiles as food. (Photo by Carl de Souza/AFP Photo)

Bloodthirsty by Thomas P. Peschak, Germany/South Africa — winner, Behaviour: birds. When rations run short on Wolf Island, in the remote northern Galápagos, the sharp-beaked ground finches become vampires. Their sitting targets are Nazca boobies and other large birds. The finches rely on a scant diet of seeds and insects, which regularly dries up, so they drink blood to survive. ‘I’ve seen more than half a dozen finches drinking from a single Nazca booby,’ says Tom. Rather than leave their nests the boobies tolerate the vampires, and the blood loss doesn’t seem to cause permanent harm. (Photo by Thomas P. Peschak/2018 Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

A woman spends her time outdoors to observe the ancient festival of Sizdeh Bedar, an annual public picnic day on the 13th day of the Iranian new year, at the Tochal mountainous area northern Tehran, Iran, Sunday, April, 2, 2017. Sizdeh Bedar, which comes from the Farsi words for “thirteen” and “day out”, is a legacy from Iran's pre-Islamic past that hard-liners in the Islamic Republic never managed to erase from calendars. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

“Don't Leave Any Food On Your Plate”. The giraffes at Nairobi's Giraffe Manor are totally at home with humans. They will eat out of your hand, or even off your plate. Photo location: Giraffe Manor, Nairobi, Kenya. (Photo and caption by Gavin Werbeloff/National Geographic Photo Contest)