See the Scientific and the Mundane Become Surprisingly Dazzling When Viewed Through a Microscope, From Neurons to Ballpoint Pens

The Nikon Small World Competition has announced its photography winners for its 52nd annual contest. This comes weeks after its video winner was dethroned for use of generative A.I.

Georgia Michelman | Editorial Intern

October 21, 2026 10:00 a.m.

The winning images have been announced for the 52nd Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. This year’s winners—all captured through a microscope—include zoomed-in shots of slime mold spores, baby sea urchins bathed in fluorescence and everyday writing utensils transformed into enchanted objects.

From a pool of more than 1,800 entries submitted from 69 countries, the judges selected 20 winners as well as honorable mentions and images of distinction. Ole Bielfeldt, a student and experimental photographer in Cologne, Germany, clinched first place with his otherworldly shot of a printer in motion—a project he started two years ago.

“The beautiful thing about microscopy is that it lets us discover the incredible invisible worlds around us,” Quinten Geldhof, a technical designer at Boston’s Museum of Science and one of this year’s judges, tells Smithsonian magazine in an email. “Getting to see an appliance that we use in our day to day lives, portrayed with such incredible detail, really made this image stand out.”

In Bielfeldt’s winning image, globs of ink stretch down through a fog of flash, dripping onto a slice of white paper. If you tilt your head slightly, nascent letters start to appear: m-a-c. In full, Bielfeldt was spelling “macrofying,” which is the name of his Instagram account boasting more than one million followers.

“I’ve kind of built a bit of respect for the printer,” he says to Smithsonian. “It’s such a crazy thing that just moves super fast while simultaneously shooting out these little droplets.”

To effectively photograph the printing process, Bielfeldt had to “reverse-engineer” the printer, he says, setting the printhead still and instead shifting the paper beneath it. He then captured the ink-injecting process using flash and his own custom-built equipment.

Bielfeldt, who enjoys turning his lens on seemingly mundane objects, says he was surprised at the messiness of the ink nozzles when he got his first up-close glimpse. “It’s almost like in nature, very all over the place, while still following kind of a structure,” he says.

The 4th place winner, Justin Theodore Benttinen, also took a surreal look at a ubiquitous object. The photographer from Berkeley, California, snapped the shimmering tip of a ballpoint pen, magnified 20 times.

“One of the core principles of my photographic practice is to find the repetition of patterns throughout both the built and natural worlds at different scales,” Benttinen says in an email. “In a more flippant tone,” he adds, “I just thought it looked cool.”

Other photographers captured biological phenomena, such as the 11th-place winner, Svenja Carolin Kling, a marine biology PhD student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. Kling imaged a 20-day-old sea urchin larva, glittering with blue fluorescence.

“My research is on genetic tools in sea urchins because they are a model organism for developmental biology research,” Kling says in an email. “I basically ‘made’ this urchin myself.”

A month ago, the winners of the video version of Nikon’s contest, called Small World in Motion, were unveiled. But several weeks later, the winner, Ning Xu of the National University of Singapore, was stripped of first place, after an investigation found he had not followed proper protocols regarding generative artificial intelligence. (In a now-deleted LinkedIn post, Xu said that A.I. was used in post-production to enhance certain features, but not to generate the film, reported Nature’s Rachel Fieldhouse in September.)

In a statement earlier this month, Nikon addressed the change to the rankings in its video contest. “This decision is based solely on the submitted video’s eligibility under the rules outlined for this competition. It should not be interpreted as a judgment of the entrant’s professional reputation, scientific contributions or intent,” per the statement. “Advances in imaging and artificial intelligence continue to evolve rapidly, creating new challenges for organizations across many fields.”

Bielfeldt says he doesn’t mind the use of A.I. when properly disclosed. But he’d rather it not touch his art. In the case of the printer, with its internal chaos, he doubts that generative A.I. would have reproduced it accurately. “For me, it’s a great tool to do stuff that I don’t want to do,” he says, “but I want to keep it away from the stuff that I have fun doing.”

All the recognized images can be found in a gallery on the Nikon Small World website. You can see the rest of the second- through tenth-place winners below.