Performers on boats take part in the Qintong Boat Festival at Qin Lake National Wetland Park on April 6, 2019 in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province of China. The boat festival is held around the Qingming Festival every year, and up to 10,000 participants from nearby villages and towns, with more than 500 boats, took part in the event this year. (Photo by Tang Dehong/VCG via Getty Images)

A swimmer competes in Le Defi Monte-Cristo (Monte Cristo Challenge) swimming event at the Chateau d'If, off the coast of Marseille, southern France, on June 21, 2019. Created in 1999 and inspired by Alexandre Dumas' character of Edmond Dantes, the Monte Cristo Challenge will take place from June 21 to 23, 2019. (Photo by Boris Horvat/AFP Photo)

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)

The Wildscreen festival is the world’s biggest celebration of screen-based natural history storytelling which takes place every two years in Bristol. Here: “Walrus in Midnight Sun”. Walrus feed mostly on bivalves in productive, shallow and often sandy habitats in the Arctic. This individual, though, arrived on a beach outside Tromsø, northern Norway, and found comfort on a stranded dead sperm whale. After two weeks he approached Audun, and only half a metre away he stretched his tusk forward and touched his hand gently. “This was one of the most memorable moments of my life”, Rikardsen says. He named the 500kg male Buddy. After two months, the dead whale was decomposed and Buddy suddenly disappeared. (Photo by Audun Rikardsen/Wildscreen 2016)

A boy dressed as Hindu Lord Shiva poses before performing in a religious procession at the Mahashivratri festival in Allahabad, India, March 7, 2016. Hindus across the country celebrate Mahashivratri, better known as Lord Shiva's wedding anniversary. (Photo by Jitendra Prakash/Reuters)

A woman reacts as she receives a dose of the COVISHIELD vaccine against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), manufactured by Serum Institute of India, at a vaccination centre in Ahmedabad, India, December 27, 2021. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

A demonstrator plays the role of person hanging herself during a protest over the Thai government's handling of the coronavirus pandemic and to demand Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha's resignation, in Bangkok, Thailand, September 6, 2021. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

English singer and songwriter Dua Lipa photographs herself as an “Albanian girl in Albania” in the second decade of August 2022. (Photo by dualipa/Instagram)