Miners pulling up lazy tourists to the rim of Kawah Ijen (Ijen Volcano), East Java, Indonesia on September 21, 2017. They will earn as much as they would bring down a load of sulfur. Nomadic Explorer, Cultural Lifestyle Photographer Claudio Sieber captured striking images of miners working at Ijen volcanic range in East Java, Indonesia. The sulphur miners risk their lives daily as they climb the active volcano carrying heavy loads, which they sell to sugar refineries. (Photo by Claudio Sieber/Barcroft Images)

Macro or Micro? Scientists’ pictures baffle our sense of scale. It began when Stephen Young, a geography professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, tricked his biologist colleague Paul Kelly into thinking a satellite image was one of his electron microscope scans. Can you guess whether they are close-up or very far away? (Photo by Paul Kelly)

In this photo taken Wednesday, October 29, 2014, a fisherman catches a fish near the shores of Lake Chivero, west of Harare. Illegal fishing can be hazardous in Zimbabwe, where poachers scan the banks for armed rangers and the water for crocodiles while they cast their rods. The country is in such a dire economic state that thousands of people, unable to find regular work, flock to Lake Chivero in hopes of catching fish, mostly bream, that they can sell for desperately needed income. (Photo by Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP Photo)

Beautiful, strange and occasionally alarming pictures from the shortlist for this year’s Wellcome image awards – which celebrate the very best in science photography and imaging – from an x-ray of a bat to a micrograph of a kidney stone. The exhibition opens on 12 March at three science centres and the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) of an Arabidopsis thaliana flower, also commonly known as thale cress. Some of the anthers are open, revealing pollen grains ready for dispersal. Arabidopsis was the first plant to have its entire genome sequenced and is widely used as a model organism in molecular and plant biology. Horizontal width of image is 1200 microns. Magnification 100x. (Photo by Stefan Eberhard/Wellcome Images)

Customer Andreas Kroker looks at a 3D-printed figure of himself at the Twinkind 3D printing studio in Berlin, December 13, 2013. A 3D-printed likeness is produced by taking a 360 degree photographic scan of a person, which is then rendered into a 3D digital model and retouched to meet the requirements for printing. The printing machine uses this digital model to produce a high-resolution solid figure. Twinkind co-founder Timo Schaedel said, people often come to the session well-groomed, with fresh hair-cuts and their best clothes, “just as they used to do in the past, when they had their portrait taken in a photo studio”. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

These images have been created using a colour scanning electron microscope (SEM) by the award-winning Eye of Science, comprised of snapper Oliver Meckes and biologist Nicole Ottawa. For a decade the pair, based in Reutlingen in the south of Germany, worked with an old SEM they saved from the scrapheap, but for the last five years they have used a £250,000 FEI Quanta Series Field Emission SEM. Oliver said: “Flowers are beautiful in 'normal' view, but when you look closer, some parts get very bizarre and unexpected structures appear – flowers within flowers, worlds within worlds”. Photo: The floret of a Chamomile flower up close and personal. (Photo by Oliver Meckes/Barcroft Media)