“Eye of a toad”. Animal Portraits, Łukasz Bożycki, Poland. Early spring sees a pond near Łukasz’s home city of Warsaw, Poland, full of mating frogs and a few toads. On this March day, Łukasz shared the pond with them for an evening, sitting in the icy water in his chest-high waders, keeping as still as possible, despite the numbing cold, so that the amphibians could get used to him. “I wanted to find a fresh way of portraying the amphibians”, he says, “at water level”. Using a telephoto lens, he focused on one lone toad and waited for the sun to dip almost below the horizon before pressing the shutter, using flash to bring out the details in the shadow. His prize was “the glorious pool of sunset colour” and fiery glow of the toad’s eye. Nikon D80 + 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 lens + extension tube; 1/125 sec at f9 (-2.3 e/v); ISO 100; built-in flash. (Photo by Łukasz Bożycki)

A young male fiddler crab is dwarfed by an older male of the same species, looming behind it at Morua estuary, in the Gulf of California, Mexico on January 4, 2022. Whereas female fiddler crabs have small claws of equal sizes, the males’ pincers can vary in size, with the small one used to pick up food and the larger to impress females. (Photo by Claudio Contreras/Solent News)

A woman cuts her hair during a protest against the death of Iranian Mahsa Amini and the government of Iran on October 02, 2022 in Istanbul, Turkey. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

The secretive indri (Indri indri) of Madagascar, the largest living lemur. It is also critically endangered and highly evolutionarily distinct with no close relatives, which makes its branch one of most precarious on the mammal evolutionary tree. In the likely event that the indri goes extinct, we will lose 19m years of unique evolutionary history from the mammal tree of life. (Photo by Pierre-Yves Babelon/Aarhus University)

A woman with a dove on her back pays tribute to Yemanja, goddess of the sea, during a traditional New Year's Eve celebration in Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on December 29, 2023. (Photo by Pilar Olivares/Reuters)

Queen Elizabeth II (as Princess Elizabeth) writing at her desk in Windsor Castle, Berkshire. (Photo by Lisa Sheridan/Studio Lisa/Getty Images). 30th May 1944

“The Falklands War, also known as the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was a 1982 limited war between Argentina and the United Kingdom. The conflict resulted from the long-standing dispute over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, which lie in the South Atlantic east of Argentina”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Kenneth “Rocky” Hudson, a Petty Officer from Gosport aboard HMS Hermes, the flagship of the Royal Navy, heading for the Falkland Islands. The troops are waging a Mexican moustache growing contest and Kenneth is wearing 30mm cannon shells slung around his body and sporting a fat cigar. (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images). 18th April 1982

A Republican farmer defending a farm on the outskirts of Irun against Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War, 6th September 1936. A comrade lies dead by his side. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)