“Eye of a toad”. Animal Portraits, Łukasz Bożycki, Poland. Early spring sees a pond near Łukasz’s home city of Warsaw, Poland, full of mating frogs and a few toads. On this March day, Łukasz shared the pond with them for an evening, sitting in the icy water in his chest-high waders, keeping as still as possible, despite the numbing cold, so that the amphibians could get used to him. “I wanted to find a fresh way of portraying the amphibians”, he says, “at water level”. Using a telephoto lens, he focused on one lone toad and waited for the sun to dip almost below the horizon before pressing the shutter, using flash to bring out the details in the shadow. His prize was “the glorious pool of sunset colour” and fiery glow of the toad’s eye. Nikon D80 + 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 lens + extension tube; 1/125 sec at f9 (-2.3 e/v); ISO 100; built-in flash. (Photo by Łukasz Bożycki)

Visitors watch as Grigory Broverman, a member of the Cryophile winter swimmers club, pours a bucket of cold water over his 6-year-old daughter Liza during a flash mob, part of a celebration of Polar Bear Day at the Royev Ruchey Zoo in a suburb of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia, November 29, 2015. The air temperature was around minus 5 degrees Celsius. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Neil Zeller's snaps were taken across Canada, where he photographs the northern lights dancing across a dark night sky. In one stunning shot, Zeller, 42, even manages to capture a flash of lightning beneath a storm cell while an aurora gives off a magnificent green glow. The photographer, from Calgary, Alberta, describes himself as a night person, and became interested in night photography about 10 years ago. (Photo by Neil Zeller/Caters News)

American actress and model Megan Fox looks lush in a green bikini for a forest photoshoot which sent social media wild in the second decade of July 2023. (Photo by Cibelle Levi)

A passenger without pants waits for the subway train during “The No Pants Subway Ride” in Mexico City January 11, 2015. The event, the fifth organized in Mexico, is an annual flash mob and occurs in different cities around the world, according to its organisers. (Photo by Edgard Garrido/Reuters)

Blizzard in the High Peak, Derbyshire, by John Finney: “After a difficult journey in the snow, I made my way from Mam Tor down onto the Great Ridge. As the clouds got darker, I placed the tripod and camera at just the right angle to avoid snow getting onto the lens, and used a flash gun and a relatively slow shutter speed to highlight the fast motion of the blizzard”. Classic view, adult class – winner. (Photo by John Finney/Landscape Photographer of the Year)

A firefighter carries a woman from her car after it was caught in street flooding as a powerful storm moves across Southern California on February 17, 2017 in Sun Valley, California. After years of severe drought, heavy winter rains have come to the state, and with them, the issuance of flash flood watches in Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties, and the evacuation of hundreds of residents from Duarte, California for fear of flash flooding from areas denuded by a wildfire last year. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Nationalist youths throw bottles at police officers after the annual Orange march on July 12, 2016 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The controversial Ardoyne interface is a flash point between the Catholic and Protestant communities with trouble flaring in the area frequently during the so called marching season. The Protestant Orange bands from the nearby area have been stopped from parading past the Catholic Ardoyne for the past three years. (Photo by Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)