This is the moment a diver appears to shake hands with a giant 52ft whale. The divers were just metres away when one humpback whale – which weighs 36,000kg – extends its giant flipper in a peaceful manner. (Photo by Masa Ushioda/SeaPics/Solent News & Photo Agency)

A curious leopard cub toys with a camera at MalaMala Game Reserve in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. (Photo by Barcroft Media)

The Tree Projects team spent 67 days documenting one eucalyptus regnans in the Styx valley of Tasmania. Using a combination of tree-climbing and elaborate arboreal rigging techniques, they produced an intimate portrait from an impossible perspective of one of the world’s largest individual flowering trees, which goes by several common names. These photos document the process that resulted in an extraordinary ultra high-definition photograph. Here: Haley nears the top of the tree. (Photo by Steven Pearce/The Tree Projects/The Guardian)

Wildlife category, open shortlist. “Buffaloes and stars”. This picture, taken at Zimanga game reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, used an in-camera multiple exposure, with the first lit for the buffaloes and the second focused on the stars. (Photo and caption by Andreas Hemb/2017 Sony World Photography Awards)

Christian Balderosdasco, 31, is being pulled up a mud pit after diving for 3 hours to look for gold on March 22, 2017 in Paracale, Philippines. Apart from tunneling and sifting sand, locals dive down murky swamps with the aid of a compressor with air flowing in a small tube for breathing, as they blindly swim under the mud for up to four hours to look for tiny rocks containing gold particles. For decades, local residents at Paracale town work in hazardous conditions scavenging under the earth and diving into tunnels filled with mud using only makeshift tools to mine for gold, often placing their health and lives at risk. (Photo by Jes Aznar/Getty Images)

A grasshopper rests on a photographic camera during a meeting in the village of Alto Jamari called to face the threat of armed land grabbers invading the Uru-eu-wau-wau Indigenous Reservation near Campo Novo de Rondonia, Brazil on January 30, 2019. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

Actress Edy Williams attends the 58th Annual Academy Awards on March 24, 1986 at Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)

In this photo taken on Thursday, March 7, 2019, the sun rises over the star on the spire on top of a Stalin-era skyscraper, now the Radisson Royal Hotel on the banks of the Moskva River in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Dmitry Serebryakov/AP Photo)