The winners of Nikon’s annual Small World photography contest reveal tiny marvels of the natural world that are normally hidden from sight.
BYNADIA DRAKE, OCTOBER 11, 2022
A delicate puff of smoke particles, comprising unburnt carbon from candle wax, streams upward from the candle’s still-smoldering wick. Photographer Ole Bielfeldt created the image in his studio, using an extremely fast shutter speed (1/8000) and a very strong LED light source.
OLE BIELFELDT
Throughout history, humans have struggled to understand the realities that exist beyond our natural perception. Whether it’s the vibrant sensory worlds that non-human animals experience, the immensity of the observable universe, or the inner workings of the microscopic realm, there are countless wonders that humans are unable to see directly.
Fortunately, people have mastered the art of magnifying and capturing the minuscule. And every year, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition celebrates images that bring these diminutive worlds into view. For the competition’s 48th year, four judges sifted through nearly 1,300 submissions and selected a handful of entries that rose to the top.
Announced today, the winner is an image from University of Geneva researchers Grigorii Timin and Michel Milinkovitch that shows the hand of an embryonic Madagascar giant day gecko. Created using microscopy and image stitching, the result is a fluorescent vista that reveals the delicate complexity of the gecko’s hand, highlighting the nerves, tendons, ligaments, bones, and blood cells that work synergistically to help these creatures effortlessly scale walls.
Other images capture a brambly looking cluster of human milk ducts, a puff of smoke, and the fruiting body of a slime mold—an organism that looks as though it were yanked straight from a fantasy story. All of the winners are available for viewing on Nikon’s website, and for this story, National Geographic photo editor Samantha Clark selected 13 images that captured her imagination, demonstrated the power of microscopy, or inspired her to think more deeply about the hidden world that’s just out of sight.
“Seeing eye-to-eye with insects like this is always thrilling. And now every time I look at an asparagus, I might think of this one,” Clark says. “The winning image of the embryonic gecko hand is hypnotizing with all the layers of skin, bones, and blood vessels. And who knew the human colon could be so groovy in this flower-power image of epithelial crypts?”
This year’s winning image reveals the anatomical microcosmos within the hand of an embryonic Madagascar giant day gecko (Phelsuma grandis). The image, magnified 63 times, is the work of Grigorii Timin and Michel Milinkovitch from Switzerland’s University of Geneva.
These tangled bulbs, magnified 40 times, might look botanical in origin—but they’re actually milk-producing structures within human breast tissue. Caleb Dawson, of Australia’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, won second place with this image.
Left: No, this isn’t Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s a splash of highly ordered liquid crystal, magnified 40 times and photographed with a polarized filter. The Warsaw University of Technology’s Marek Sutkowski named the image after the Polish photographer Benedykt Jerzy Dorys. “His style was inventive and unique in the pre-war and post-war periods in Poland,” Sutkowski writes in an email. The image title, Portrait of a man in uniform, “is an honor for his famous portrait works.”
Right: Normally, these critters can be found hanging in a corner, but this long-bodied cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides) is the subject of this year’s fourth place winner. Andrew Posselt of the University of California, San Francisco, made the final image by stitching together more than 200 individual shots using a computer program that selects the sharpest portions of each and combines them to yield the final result.
In this image from Murat Öztürk, a tiger beetle—perhaps one of the fastest insects in the world—clamps down on a fly. “It is quite difficult to observe this wild state in the insect world. No one looks into the mouth of an insect with a magnifying glass,” Öztürk writes in an email. “Tiger beetles have strong and sharp jaws. The chances of survival of the creatures caught by this insect are very low.”
A forest of brain cells bursts with color in this psychedelic image from the Ohio State University’s Andrea Tedeschi, who studies traumatic brain and spinal cord injuries. These neurons are part of a mouse’s sensory-motor cortex and are fluorescently stained and magnified 10 times.
Magnified 10 times, this tiny tower is a stack of moth eggs captured by Ye Fei Zhang. “I found these three moth eggs on a very small leaf, and they were strangely superimposed together,” Zhang writes in an email. “There were no red markings on the surface of the moth eggs when they were first found. Over the next two days, the inside of the moth's eggs continued to develop, and such beautiful red markings appeared.”
This kaleidoscopic bouquet is a cross-section of a normal human colon, populated by epithelial crypts. Magnified 20 times, the tissue was photographed by Ziad El-Zaatari, a surgical pathologist at Houston Methodist Hospital. “It is something I commonly see in my daily practice,” El-Zaatari writes in an email. “It is an important part of my job to know what normal tissues look like, versus what abnormal tissue looks like, in order to recognize disease and give an accurate diagnosis.”
Left: Winning fifth place this year is an image that looks like it’s ripped straight from a fantastical landscape. This delicate structure is the tiny fruiting body of a slime mold (Lamproderma), a single-celled organism that is often thought to be among the strangest on Earth. “Despite the rather unflattering common name, slime molds are astonishingly beautiful organisms,” photographer Alison Pollack writes in an email. “Lamproderma species are my favorites, as most of them have beautiful iridescent blue-purple colors. Those in the picture were on a leaf that I found when searching near my home after a particularly heavy rainfall.”
Right: An often-maligned vegetable, the humble asparagus takes center stage in this image from Ghent University’s Olivier Leroux, who describes the structure as “complex but fragile.” Protected by scales, the cells in the white asparagus’s tip contain all the instructions needed to generate the plant’s above-ground organs.
Although this image resembles one of the massive, human-eating sandworms in Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, the fringe of groovy, geometric columns is really a cross-section of fluorescently stained mouse intestine. Winning third place in this year’s contest, the image is the work of the University of Helsinki’s Satu Paavonsalo and Sinem Karaman.
This view, magnified 60 times, captures the striking colors and textures of an agatized dinosaur bone. Photographed by Randy Fullbright, such mineralized fossils are rare.
(Sources: National Geographic)
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