Nature – first prize, stories. Pandemic Pigeons – A Love Story. The photographer’s daughter, Merel, cowers after Dollie flies past and perches on the balcony before entering the house in Vlaardingen in the Netherlands on 6 April 2020. “She’s still frightened when Dollie suddenly lands on the balcony railing. I hide my smile behind the camera, as I try to comfort her by saying they won’t hurt you. “I thought he was going to attack me”, she replies. As the nesting pigeons keep coming back to our place, slowly my girls have started to appreciate them – perhaps not as much as I do, but it’s a start”. (Photo by Jasper Doest/World Press Photo 2021)

For her series “Japanese Whispers”, Belgian photographer Zaza Bertrand headed inside the intimate world of rabuhos – Japanese love hotels. Love hotels became popular in Japan from the 1960s onwards, due to a lack of privacy in many family homes. There are now around 37,000 of these hotels in Japan, allowing short daytime “rests” or overnight stays. (Photo by Zaza Bertrand/The Guardian)

An indigenous woman kicks the ball during a Mayan ball game match in Tecpan, Guatemala on March 23, 2024. Dressed in shorts, girdle and uncovered torso, members of eleven teams from the Guatemalan indigenous departments of Chimaltenango, Quiche, Solola and Quetzaltenango, as well as one from El Salvador, commemorated the March equinox with a tournament of the ancestral Mayan ball game on Saturday. (Photo by Photo by Johan Ordonez/AFP Photo)

A three-week-old chihuahua puppy named Tom Thumb poses in a tea cup on April 7, 2009 in Renton, Scotland. The pup, which measures eight inches long, is thought to be one of the smallest dogs born in the UK and is just two inches short of a world record. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

City stairways grey, cold concrete which is often dirty. These Street Artists around the world decided to do something about it. What they have done is nothing short of phenomenal. You won’t believe it. You’ve have to see these incredible transformations that took these stairs from dull to beautiful!

Bici Palermo Tuning – a group of teenagers from the Sicilian capital Palermo – spend anything up to €1,300 customising their bikes with car batteries and multiple speakers to develop thunderous sound systems. The police are not impressed. (Photo by Matteo de Mayda/Cosimo Bizzari/The Guardian)

“Asaro from the Eastern Highlands”. The mudmen could not cover their faces with mud because the people of Papua New Guinea thought that the mud from the Asaro river was poisonous. So instead of covering their faces with this alleged poison, they made masks from pebbles that they heated and water from the waterfall, with unusual designs such as long or very short ears either going down to the chin or sticking up at the top, long joined eyebrows attached to the top of the ears, horns and sideways mouths. (Photo and caption by Jimmy Nelson)