Photo of the Day: Best of October
Every day, we feature an image chosen from thousands around National Geographic. Here are some highlights from October.
As the new editor of Photo of the Day, I’ve been getting to know what inspires you—every day. For October, animals and landscapes dominated your favorites, which I’m sure is no surprise to anyone who loves photography and National Geographic. I hope you enjoy my favorites from the month including a peacock outside of his native habitat, a juvenile fox learning to hunt, a stunning eclipse in Norway, and more!
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At the edge of a field full of expectant festivalgoers, a fire performer practices her hoop routine before her performance at the Lantern Fest in Omaha, Nebraska. Calla Kessler, who submitted this photo to the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest, met the performer and her group “by chance” and was intrigued. “After getting to know them a bit,” she writes, “I asked if I could photograph their practice and stayed with them until dark.”
On Waikiki Beach, the sand appears almost pink in the morning sun, and plenty of early beachgoers dot the turquoise water. The color and energy of the scene wasn’t lost on Christine Kaharmen, who submitted this photo to the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest. “I woke up and went out to my hotel balcony that morning, and Waikiki was already packed with people!” she writes. “[I] love the scene of the beach life!”
After following a den of foxes in Quebec for an entire summer, Your Shot member Denis Dumoulin knew that the first snowfall would present a unique opportunity to see the animals in a new way. He was right: After a night spent on the ground concealed from their view, he captured this well-earned shot of a young fox learning to hunt. “I [saw] magnificent scenes of training in the mulotage,” Dumoulin says. “All this lasted only a few minutes … [just enough] time to immortalize him.”
In the northern slopes of the Tian Shan Mountains in China, a river carves its way through a canyon. The Earth’s rocky layers are eroded by wind and water and exposed, transforming the landscape into these colorful terraces.
A colorful peafowl seems to take in the view on the other side of the wall at Ambras Castle in Innsbruck, Austria. Your Shot member Olena Prykhodko was so astonished to see the bird that she made this photo to remember the moment. “I would never [have] expected to find a peafowl in the middle of the Alps,” she writes, “because they live in warm [climates], and Austria is really cold!”
Like a giant, celestial version of a child’s night-light, a solar eclipse gleams over the mountains of Spitsbergen, Norway. But those who witnessed the event were—hopefully—happy not to have slept through it, including Isabelle Bacher, who submitted the photo to the 2015 National Geographic Photo Contest and described the scene as “just magical.”
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