Run by the Society of German Nature Photographers (Gesellschaft Deutscher Tierfotografen), the prestigious annual contest celebrates the best wildlife photography from members in Germany. Here: Landscapes, second place: Florian Smit, “Rainforest” (Danum valley, Borneo). (Photo by Florian Smit/2019 GDT Nature Photographer of the Year)

Dead leaf or almost by Guilhem Duvot. Taken in Nován Stráž, Slovakia. Describe what is pictured? A dead leaf grasshopper. How does this image fit with the theme of the competition? The perfect camouflage – nature is amazing. I saw the grasshopper only because it jumped. (Photo by Guilhem Duvot/Royal Society of Biology)

The Zammitt Family. “A portrait of the Zammitt family at their western Sydney home, with their dogs, Benji and Beau. Brian Zammitt (second from left) is the head of his booming family business, BAMS Hygiene Management, one of Australia’s leading deep cleaning companies, which specialises in disinfecting workplaces and locations contaminated with Covid-19. His wife, Sandra, and daughters Natalie and Louisa all play key frontline roles in the business”. (Photo by John Janson-Moore/Australia’s National Photographic Portrait Prize 2022)

“An Oscar nominated documentary maker and war photographer who learnt his trade at Cardiff University has been killed while covering the conflict in Lybia. Tim Hetherington is understood to have died in a rocket-propelled grenade attack in the Libyan city of Misrata. Earlier this year the 40-year-old was nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Academy Awards for the war documentary Restrepo which he co-directed”. – WalesOnline

Photo: Tim Hetherington arrives at the 83rd Annual Academy Awards – Nominated Docs! Reception on February 23, 2011 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Valerie Macon/Getty Images)

“Hey! I'm Thomas Shahan, an artist and macrophotographer from Oklahoma. In my spare time over the past few years, I've been shooting portraiture of local arthropods. Why would I devote countless hours to tramping through forests, fields and the like searching for insects and spiders? Well, despite some common beliefs, arthropods (members of the phylum Arthropoda – insects, spiders, crustaceans...) represent an endlessly varied, wildly beautiful and fascinating bunch of animals with surprisingly personable faces and behavior. Often, all it takes is simply inspecting their lives on a closer level to turn repulsion to reverence”. – Thomas Shahan

Photo: Adult Male Jumping Spider at Sunset – Phidippus mystaceus. (Photo by Thomas Shahan; Source: Flickr)

A) 1st place WINNER – Roy Rimmer. “This rat was in an outdoor set I made, the set up is two meters long and a meter wide made of Perspex,it has a plywood front with holes cut in for my camera and flash guns, I placed two rusty paint cans in the set up and the rat would leap from one can too the other, I had to use flash to freeze the action”.

Many powerful photographs have been made in the aftermath of the devastating collapse of a garment factory on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh. But one photo, by Bangladeshi photographer Taslima Akhter, has emerged as the most heart wrenching, capturing an entire country’s grief in a single image... Photo: Two victims amid the rubble of a garment factory building collapse in Savar, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, April 25, 2013. (Photo by Taslima Akhter)

“Guns have a massive amount of power associated with them. They are designed to kill. We decided to photograph portraits of them in a similar way you might photograph a powerful person. Like powerful people, pistols have this “perfect” quality that we wanted to explore. As we started shooting them, we could see flaws in their design. Metal burring around the barrels, scratches in the metal. This imperfection and detail were very interesting to us; connecting us back to these images as portraits”. – Peter Andrew. (Photo by Peter Andrew/Simon Duffy/Derek Blais)