“A snapshot from mountaineer's life”. Have you ever wondered how does a mountaineer's day start? I will give you a hint: you wake up at 3 am, set the stove, wake up your partner, pretend it is warm, quickly consume a high-calorie breakfast, watch your friends slowly ascending the icy slopes of your dream summit with their tiny head torches glimmering against perfectly blue ice, and hope for the good weather. One would ask: why all this trouble? The answer is easy: for the love of the adventure and the unknown. Location: Chamonix, Haute Savoye, France. (Photo and caption by Kamil Tamiola/National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

ATTENTION! All pictures are presented in high resolution. To see Hi-Res images – just TWICE click on any picture. In other words, click small picture – opens the BIG picture. Click BIG picture – opens VERY BIG picture.

Miners pulling up lazy tourists to the rim of Kawah Ijen (Ijen Volcano), East Java, Indonesia on September 21, 2017. They will earn as much as they would bring down a load of sulfur. Nomadic Explorer, Cultural Lifestyle Photographer Claudio Sieber captured striking images of miners working at Ijen volcanic range in East Java, Indonesia. The sulphur miners risk their lives daily as they climb the active volcano carrying heavy loads, which they sell to sugar refineries. (Photo by Claudio Sieber/Barcroft Images)

Semi-feral, conservation ponies, graze on the salt marsh's of Gower, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom on September 7, 2022. (Photo by Joann Randles/Cover Images)

These photos and video were taken in the Russian city of Astrakhan on the evening of June 7th, 2012. (Photo by Maxim Korotshenko)

With its huge eyes, comical name and diminutive size, Mark R. Smith’s image of a baby Hawaiian bobtail squid can’t help but raise a smile. A curiously endearing creature, the cephalopod is just 1.5cm across, its mantle cavity bearing more than a passing resemblance to a rather natty shower cap. But it is also a beautiful example of symbiosis – nature’s version of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” – for on the underside of the squid is a light organ which houses bioluminescent bacteria. The squid offers the bacteria protection and food, while the bacteria emit a glow – a handy trait that the squid uses to offset its silhouette, helping it to evade predators in the depths below. Mark R. Smith’s entry combines several images of a Hawaiian bobtail squid with different focus lengths to create a final picture with greater depth of field than normal. (Photo by Mark R. Smith/Wellcome Images/Macroscopic Solutions)

Brain-on-a-chip. Dazzling in green and magenta this image shows the nerve fibres (in green) produced by neural stem cells (in magenta) as they grow on a synthetic gel. Captured by a technique known as confocal microscopy, the image is part of research shedding light on how tinkering with the environment can affect the way in which nerve fibres grow. (Photo by Collin Edington and Iris Lee/Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Wellcome Images)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)