I’ve posted before about the Nikon Small World’s microscopy/photography competition. Today, however, focuses on another Maker of Excellent Photographic Equipment - Olympus.
For the last 10 years (says the website), Olympus has been sponsoring an international microscopy (i.e.photographing things with a microscope) competition - The Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition - and this year’s winners have just been announced.Over 2,000 images were submitted this year, so the achievement is certainly an impressive one!
You can see this year’s extraordinary winning images, and the runners-up (Honourable Mentions, that is), here. Interestingly, the first place is a video - of rotifers, no less - rather than a simple photograph. I’d recommend this lovely article from MSNBC’s Cosmic Log, which interviews the chap responsible for the 1st place winner. An excerpt:
When Grimm got the slimeball under his microscope and cranked the magnification to 200x, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “I had never seen this species of rotifer before,” he said. Rotifers are tiny animals that live primarily in fresh water and gobble up gunk.
“Forget about lunch. Don’t worry about breakfast,” he said. “This is how I spent the entire day, just filming.”
That’s just how I used to feel back in the day, spending time in the quiet, dark, cool fluorescence microscope room back at university (and the darkroom in school!) :) I still wonder, to this day, whether I should have become a microscopist…
I found it difficult choosing my faovurite photos or videos (for there’s more than one video, huzzah!). Which is your favourite?
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Related posts:
Nikon’s Small World photo competition winners 2012 now out!
Brilliant photos of small things