Explosions, tranquility and cuteness all make their way into the Smithsonian's 2015 Photo Contest.
Smithsonian Magazine recently announced the winning images of its 13th annual photo contest after boiling down some 46,000 entries sent in from 168 countries.
If you’re a photographer yourself, they are also accepting applicants for this year's 14th contest, for which you can upload your entry online through the website until November 30, 2016.
Categories include People, Natural World, Travel, Altered Images and The American Experience. You can check out all the images on the Photo Contest website. Here are some of our favorites, along with some of the winning entries, which show off the natural world and all things science related.
Grand Prize Winner: A stampede of ash and gas crashes down Mount Sinabung towards a lone tree in Indonesia on June 26, 2015. Albert Ivan Damanik/Smithsonian.
A crab-eating macaque calls out to another monkey in the Ubud Monkey Forest, Indonesia. Armin Nayak/Smithsonian.
Altered Images Category Winner: Fireflies light up the night in Tennessee. To achieve this effect, the photographer took multiple long exposure shots and merged them together. Radim Schreiber/Smithsonian.
Love is in the air in India. Sathyaram Ranganathan/Smithsonian.
Grub’s up. A gang of tree ant workers tear into a cricket in Arizona, United States. Raymond Mendez/Smithsonian.
Fine wines and finer leaves. This image shows a leaf picked from a grape vine in Rioja, Northern Spain. Roy Lomas/Smithsonian.