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)

A young supporter of ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) dressed like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives with his mother during a public meeting addressed by Modiin Hyderabad, India, Sunday, July 3, 2022. (Photo by Mahesh Kumar A./AP Photo)

A woman sits next to a Gollum figure on the “Middle-earth Shuttle” subway train November 18, 2003 in New York City. The train's cars were decorated with Middle-earth creatures, vines, moss and stones to celebrate the November 18 DVD and VHS release of the Special Extended Edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Milena Pino, 15, puts on makeup prior to taking part in a speed competition with horses at the International Livestock Fair Show in Havana March 21, 2015. (Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)

Ziripot, a traditional figure stuffed with straw, is helped up during Carnival celebrations in the Navarran village of Lantz, on February 16, 2015. (Photo by Vincent West/Reuters)

Abdulahi Yaroow, 13, smokes a cigarette while chewing khat at the same time in Mogadishu August 10, 2014. Grown on plantations in the highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia, tonnes of khat, or qat, dubbed “the flower of paradise” by its users, are flown daily into Mogadishu airport, to be distributed from there in convoys of lorries to markets across Somalia. Britain, whose large ethnic Somali community sustained a lucrative demand for the leaves, banned khat from July as an illegal drug. This prohibition jolted the khat market, creating a supply glut in Somalia and pushing down prices, to the delight of the many connoisseurs of its amphetamine-like high. (Photo by Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)

A protester gestures as he holds a dog before a burning barricade during protests in Harare, Zimbabwe on January 15, 2019. (Photo by Philimon Bulawayo/Reuters)

Visitors pose for pictures under blooming cherry blossoms at a botanical garden in Nanjing, capital of China’s eastern Jiangsu province on March 15, 2019. (Photo by Reuters/China Stringer Network)