It’s A Small World, First of All
The best images from Nikon’s 40th photo microscopy contest
Sometimes to see the beauty in something you have to look a little closer … like, 1000x closer.
It’s not news that our great big world is composed of countless tiny, tiny things. For the last 40 years, Nikon has challenged photographers to get all up in the smallest of subjects, in the hopes of bringing us new ways of seeing them. Their annual Small World competition is meant to promote technical and scientific innovation — as much as pure aesthetic beauty — in the field of light microscopy. The best examples come from professionals and amateurs alike.
“What began as a competition to recognize our customer-base for their achievements has evolved into something that has made us curators of scientific imagery in the field,” says Nikon Instruments’ Communications Manager, Eric Flem.
This year’s champion is Rogelio Moreno — his winning image of an open-mouthed rotifer is at the top of this post. The runners up include a close-up of calcite crystal, a pair of jumping spider eyeballs (above), the cells and DNA of a cow’s pulmonary artery, and the gripping appendage of a caterpillar.
The invisible intimacies of chemicals, minerals, or microorganisms are all fair game. Images are awarded for their visual beauty or technical complexity. Whether or not they’re chosen, the candidate photos are almost always astounding. The variety of the subjects and approaches reveals the seemingly endless facets of a vast, hidden micro-verse that surrounds us.
“Each photo must be relevant to science, but also exhibit exemplary technique and artistic ability,” says Flem. “Aside from the technical aspects, sometimes it’s based on the emotions of the judges and what strikes them as beautiful image.”
This year, more than 1200 entries from 79 countries were considered by a panel of four judges, comprised of two scientists and a pair of online journalists. The idea is to strike a balance of noting a visually beautiful image that’s also got a degree of research value. In previous years, technical ground has even been broken, as in the 2007 winner which introduced fluorescence in a novel way to image a mouse embryo.
The rise of digital photography has led to the number of contestants rising from the hundreds into the thousands. As of 2011, a video component to the microscopy competition has been held, and a separate initiative with Florida State University called MicroscopyU aims to foster education in the science, technique and tenets of microscopy.
While Nikon does produce microscope optics, they concede that the scientific import of a given image isn’t exactly within the scope of their expertise.
“We do know imaging,” Flen says, “and there were no photography contests at the time, to our knowledge, that covered scientific imaging. The contest isn’t as much about celebrating a specific microscope, but microscopy in general.”
