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)

Afghan children play soccer in front of the war-damaged Darul Aman Palace in the suburbs of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, June 8, 2011. (Photo by Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP Photo)

A woman stands at the door of her shanty at a slum in Mumbai, India July 20, 2016. (Photo by Danish Ismail/Reuters)

A smokejumper leaps from an airplane during a training flight above Winthrop, Washington, U.S., June 30, 2016. On a 100-degree day in early June, eight experienced firefighters did sit-ups in a semicircle training to parachute into a wildfire. Better known as “rookie candidates”, they were determined to make it through the five-week program at North Cascades Smokejumper Base in Winthrop, Washington, where the first experimental jumps occurred in 1939. (Photo by David Ryder/Reuters)

Astronaut Donald R. Pettit would often rig an array of as many as six cameras in the cupola windows and set them all to fire continuously for events such as sunsets, which only last around seven seconds on the ISS. (Photo by Donald R. Pettit)

Vintage wine bottles dated from 1946 lay down in the wine cellar of the Massandra winery near Yalta, 28 March 2014 (Yalta is a resort city on the north coast of the Black Sea in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, a territory recognized by a majority of countries as part of Ukraine and incorporated by Russia as the Republic of Crimea). Massandra winery has one of the largest wine collections in the world. (Photo by Sergei Ilnitsky/EPA)

Chen interacts with his “smart” sеx doll as he lays in a bed in his home in Guangzhou, Guandong Province, China, 05 April 2018. Chen, because of his busy pharmaceutical sales job and the travel it involves, has no time for a girlfriend. Chinese girls all want to talk about marriage after the second date and he is not interested in that for now, he said. (Photo by Aleksandar Plavevski/EPA/EFE)

In this November 12, 2015, file photo, Mt. Everest is seen from the way to Kalapatthar in Nepal. An American climber has died near the summit of Mount Everest and an Indian climber is missing after heading down from the mountain following a successful ascent, expedition organizers said Sunday. (Photo by Tashi Sherpa/AP Photo)