Nyaueth by Peter Zelewski – £2,000 third prize winner. This was taken near London’s Oxford Street as part of Zelewski’s series Beautiful Strangers. Zelewski explains: ‘The aim of Beautiful Strangers is to challenge the concept of traditional beauty with a series of spontaneous street portraits of everyday citizens who show character, uniqueness and a special inner quality’. (Photo by Peter Zelewski/Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2015)

These Northern Lights “rainbows” have turned the sky greener than the Earth below. Vitaly Istomin, 26, spent several nights in freezing conditions under the stars in northern Russia’s Khibiny Mountains to capture the aurora’s “rainbows”. (Photo by Vitaly Istomin/Caters News Agency)

A couple lights a lantern during a celebration, known as “Chaharshanbe Souri”, or Wednesday Feast, marking the eve of the last Wednesday of the solar Persian year, Tuesday, March 19, 2019, in Tehran, Iran. Iran's many woes briefly went up in smoke on Tuesday as Iranians observed a nearly 4,000-year-old Persian tradition known as the Festival of Fire. (Photo by Ebrahim Noroozi/AP Photo)

George Harrison of the Beatles sits cross-legged with his musical mentor, Ravi Shankar of India, a sitar virtuoso, in Los Angeles, August 3, 1967, as Harrison explains to newsmen that Shankar is teaching him to play the sitar, a 25-stringed guitar-like instrument. Harrison said “Indian music makes God come through in a spiritual way”. (Photo by AP Photo)

“As you can see I love the Icelandic Horse. Born and raised with them, I love to work with them and watch them ... they have unbelievable network of communication and energy I can´t explain with words”. – Gigja Einarsdottir. Photo: “Runners”. (Photo by Gigja Einarsdottir)

Japanese embroidery artist Hiroko Kubota was in the process of making custom sized clothes for her smaller-framed son when he made a small request: could some of the shirts have cats on them? Kubota explains her son was somewhat obsessed with cats and had collected a small library of adorable images found around the web.

“Newton was born in Berlin, the son of Klara “Claire” (Marquis) and Max Neustädter, a button factory owner. His family was Jewish. Newton attended the Heinrich-von-Treitschke-Realgymnasium and the American School in Berlin. Interested in photography from the age of 12 when he purchased his first camera, he worked for the German photographer Yva (Elsie Neulander Simon) from 1936. The increasingly oppressive restrictions placed on Jews by the Nuremberg laws meant that his father lost control of the factory in which he manufactured buttons and buckles; he was briefly interned in a concentration camp on “Kristallnacht”, November 9, 1938, which finally compelled the family to leave Germany. Newton's parents fled to South America. He was issued with a passport just after turning 18, and left Germany on December 5, 1938. At Trieste he boarded the “Conte Rosso” (along with about 200 others escaping the Nazis) intending to journey to China. After arriving in Singapore he found he was able to remain there, first and briefly as a photographer for the Straits Times and then as a portrait photographer”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Sigourney Weaver by Helmut Newton, 1995.

This little kingfisher clearly didn't read the sign when it landed itself a minnow in a no fishing zone. Taxi driver Paul Bird, 52, from Newmarket, Suffolk, UK, captured this amusing moment whilst out looking to photograph kingfishers in Norfolk, an hour drive from his home. Paul explained: “There are a total of six perches the bird was using from which to fish, one of them being the No Fishing sign”. (Photo by Paul Bird/Solent News & Photo Agency)