A member of the Edo Firemanship Preservation Association displays his balancing skills atop bamboo ladder during a New Year presentation by the fire brigade in Tokyo January 6, 2015. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

A worker roasts a row of pigs on bamboo poles at a roasting pit, in Manila, Philippines, December 21, 2020. (Photo by Lisa Marie David/Reuters)

Shortlisted: Pooyan Shadpoor, Houcheraghi. While walking along the shore of Larak, Iran – an island in the Persian Gulf – Shadpoor came across this luminous scene. The “magical lights of (the) plankton ... enchanted me so that I snapped the shot”, he writes. (Photo by Pooyan Shadpoor/2016 EPOTY)

Students leave school via a bamboo bridge after the area was hit by floods in Gazipur, Bangladesh on September 12, 2021. (Photo by Harun-Or-Rashid/Eyepix Group/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Fabrics dry on bamboo scaffolding on Inle lake in Myanmar, March 2024. The cloth will be made into a traditional garment called a longyi, worn by both sexes. (Photo by Hilton Chen/Solent news)

A member of the Edo Firemanship Preservation Association displays his balancing skills atop bamboo ladders during a New Year demonstration by the fire brigade in Tokyo, Japan, January 6, 2017. (Photo by Toru Hanai/Reuters)

Most of people who have visited Bali have seen the cockfighting popular among the locals. A little-known but no less ardent hobby among Bali’s farming community is cricket fighting, or mejangkrikang. The insects face off inside bamboo tubes known as bumbung, and bets are placed on the bouts, which typically last two minutes. Here: a cricket breeder shows his two adult fighter crickets on a bamboo tubes called Bumbung. (Photo by A. A. Gde Agung/JG Photo)

Whenever we don’t have enough magic in our real life, we try to create it using our imagination. The cute characters created by Belgian illustrator Marie Breuer allow us to see the mystical world that resides within her mind. It is dark and adorable, enchanting and solemn. The thing that separates her drawings from the rest is the vivid colors and the bizarre huge, anime-like heads of her characters. The pictures that we liked the most were the ones where her characters wear different living animals like cloaks, with the mood of the characters being closely linked to the animal that they are wearing. (Photo by Marie Breuer)