An elephant tosses up a cloud of dust, a grizzly bear leans into the camera lens, and a moth leaves a ghostly trail across the night sky. These are some of the finalists the Nature TTL Photographer of the Year contest, showcasing our planet’s dazzling residents and the places they call home. Over 8,000 images were submitted; here are some select finalists and winners from the competition.
An African elephant in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Crater blows dust into the air using its trunk. Elephants don’t sweat like humans, so to keep cool, the animals will wallow in mud baths and dust themselves, according to Elephant Aid International.
A caracal on the shores of Tanzania’s Lake Ndutu stalked and caught a flamingo in the lake’s shallows. Here, the wild cat traipses off with its meal. This photo took the competition’s overall prize and the category winner for Animal Behavior.
This shot of a haggard grizzly bear won the Camera Traps category of the competition, giving you an understanding of how this photo was taken. It shows a grizzly bear as its fur began to freeze, due to the frigid temperatures of the Canadian Yukon in December.
The Camera Traps runner-up is this shot of a snow leopard, high in an Indian mountain range. It puts the viewer so close to the leopard you feel like you could touch it—a testament to the efforts of the photographer, who had to scale the snowy mountain to plant the camera trap.
Lava from the Fagradalsfjall Volcano in Iceland. This photo distorts the perspective of the lava flow, conjuring an abstract design out of the molten rock’s path.
The winner of the Landscapes category shows a single sunflower sprouting from a rubbish dump in Loxton, South Africa. In the distance, a lightning strike seems to hit the horizon.
A micro-moth (Micropterix calthella) is adorned in small golden beads of pollen from a flower in Devon, UK. This image is a compilation of stacked photos, each one capturing a different element of this bedazzled insect.
This multi-exposure image of a moth shows how the animal moved across the sky one summer evening in Hungary. The moth’s path is a blur, framed by the dark trees of the forest.
This shot captures several phenomena way bigger than ourselves. The aurora casts an ethereal green line in the sky. The horizon is traced by large, icy land. A rainbow arcs up from a huge waterfall, which is smoothed by a lengthy exposure.
The winner of The Night Sky category shows a small building in the windswept northern reaches of Kosciusko, Australia, the continent’s highest point. Above the building, the vast arc of the Milky Way—our own galaxy—is clear to see.
A great crested grebe—a large water bird—is seen trekking across a pond near Poznań, Poland, in this photo. The blur on most of the photo draws attention to the focused part of the image—the plane on which the grebe swims.
The winner of the Under 16 category is this shot of two Malabar parakeets bickering. The birds were fighting over the wooden stump in Hosanagara, India. Perhaps “sharing is caring” isn’t as popular a tenet amongst birds.
This bold shot shows a male eastern gobbleguts (yes, that’s the fish’s real name) carrying eggs in its mouth. This is a normal part of the gobbleguts’ reproductive process; the males hold the eggs in their mouths until the young gobbleguts are ready to hatch. This image was taken in Chowder Bay, off the coast of Sydney, Australia.
This image won the Underwater category. It shows a pink whipray splitting a school of bannerfishes in the evening light off the coast of the Maldives. The bannerfishes’ placement give a sense of the ocean’s depth.
An old train station in Helensburg, Australia, is teeming with glow worms radiating blue-white light. There are millions of glow worms in this photo, taken during a storm—hence the soft flow of a waterfall at right.
A lone hare crosses a street in Kassel, Germany, at night. During the day, many wild animals won’t make such a trek in the streets crowded with human hustle and bustle. But at night, animals have more freedom to move about their environment.
A fox in the mountains of Switzerland. The fox seems to have realized too late that it was going to be photographed and is looking back to interrogate its photographer. The animal’s dark orange coat blends in with the light brown tree trunk on which it stands.
The winner of the Wild Portraits category is this head-on look at a male lion in Botswana. The lions depicted in this photo were busy chowing down on a young buffalo they recently felled. But one lion looked up—directly at the camera—in a shot that showcases the animal’s intensity and ferocity.