A blue observation point contrasts with the orange winter foliage of the metasequoia trees – dawn redwoods – at Huanghai Forest Park on the east coast of China in the second decade of December 2024. (Photo by Splash News and Pictures)

A meerkat stands guard as her pups cuddle at Mountain Zebra National Park, South Africa early November 2025. (Photo by Nadine Leonard/Two Point O Media)

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 Palestinian child receives food cooked by a charity kitchen amid shortages of food supplies in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on February 20, 2024. (Photo by Mohammed Salem/Reuters)

People perform acroyoga style exercices at South Pointe in Miami Beach, Florida, on February 8, 2023. (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP Photo)

In this March 2, 2018 photo, an Andean man rests with his llama while tourists take in the natural wonder of Rainbow Mountain in Pitumarca, Peru. Tourists gasp for breath as they climb for two hours to the 16,404-foot (5,000-meter) peak in the Peruvian Andes, but stunned by the magical beauty that unfurls before them. (Photo by Martin Mejia/AP Photo)