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)

Second place, Nature: double trapping. Picture taken in the Brazilian Pantanal ... when I downloaded the CF did not want to believe it ... The nature knows we always give magnificent events but sometimes extraordinary. (Photo by Massimiliano Bencivenni/National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest)

A woman plays with her three dogs at the beach after sunset in Del Mar, California, USA on November 10, 2017. (Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters)

Military policemen take part in an operation at Cidade de Deus favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on February 01, 2018. (Photo by Mauro Pimentel/AFP Photo)

A health worker pretends to give a shot to a girl's doll to help put her at ease before giving her a shot of the Coronavac vaccine for COVID-19, at a sports center as children age 5 – 11 start getting vaccinated in Asuncion, Paraguay, Monday, January 31, 2022. (Photo by Jorge Saenz/AP Photo)

American actress and singer Vanessa Hudgens poses on the red carpet during the Oscars arrivals at the 94th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 27, 2022. (Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters)

A timber truck driver (L) dressed as Father Frost is saluted by a soldier at the Kremlin's Spasskiye (Saviour) Gate in Moscow, Russian Federation, on December 24, 2013. (Photo by Vyacheslav Prokofyev/ITAR-TASS/ZUMA Press)

People sit near a fully loaded in Madama near the border with Lybia on January 1, 2015. French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian paid a surprise visit to northern Niger on January 1, to visit a base being built to combat the growing flow of weapons and jihadists from neighbouring Libya. Le Drian travelled from Chad to Madama, a desert outpost about 100 kilometres from Libya, where he saw in the New Year with troops at a French base. Madama is situated on the route used by jihadists and arms smugglers in southern Libya to reach northern Mali and Niger. (Photo by Dominique Faget/AFP Photo)