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)

A woman throws fallen leaves and jumps while posing for a photo at the Bauman garden in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, October 14, 2025. (Photo by Pavel Bednyakov/AP Photo)

Wrestlers compete during a traditional Sindhi Malakhra wrestling during a local tournament in Pakistan's port city of Karachi on December 3, 2021. (Photo by Rizwan Tabassum/AFP Photo)

Musicians in Father Frost costumes ride along Nevsky Avenue on the Dedmorobus (portmanteau of “Father Frost” and “bus”) musical bus to entertain citizens ahead of New Year celebrations in St Petersburg, Russia on December 28, 2020. (Photo by Alexander Demianchuk/TASS)

Argentinian dancer Maria Belen Ciaschi, stranded in Lebanon due to COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, dances flamenco to the music played by Uruguayan singer Walter Javier Maulelo while both wearing a mask on a seafront boardwalk in the northern coastal city of Batroun, on April 15, 2020. (Photo by Ibrahim Chalhoub/AFP Photo)

Commuters, some of them wearing masks as a precaution against the coronavirus ride an auto-rickshaw in Noida, outskirts of New Delhi, India, Thursday, July 16, 2020. (Photo by Altaf Qadri/AP Photo)

A stranded cat swims through flood water searching for dry land June 16, 2008 in Oakville, Iowa. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

A South Sudanese model applies make-up during the Festival of Fashion and Arts for Peace in Juba August 9, 2014. (Photo by Andreea Campeanu/Reuters)