Many of us who have taken Biology in high school have experienced using a microscope and it all appears to be a set of obscure minute objects that don’t make sense unlike the bright colored diagrams from out textbooks. But, what we don’t know is that to see anything in a beautiful way, one needs to know how to set the lens and lighting in the right manner. I am not talking about focusing them, as any person can do that. What I mean is that to observe the beauty of something, one must know the lighting, angles, colors and definition required to capture them. It sounds like a job for a photographer and that too who knows about microscopy.
Apparently, microscopic photography isn’t an obscure field as there are many well-trained professionals around the world who do it for a living. An annual event named Nikon Small World Competition brings together some of the finest work from this small world and displays it on their website. It is still going on and winners will be announced by 14th of this month. Seeing the pictures below, the judges will have a tough choice to announce the best photographer at this event of covering toadstools, bees and other creepy crawlers.
Here are some amazing pictures from the finalists:
The anther containing pollens
Feeding structure of an aquatic snail
Numerical traces on a Blue-ray disc
Torn photographic film
Neurons from mice relaying information
Tentacles of a flesh-eating plant
 A young starfish
Intake of a young bladderwort
Rove Beetle Head
Spore capsule of a moss
Acne medication in crystallized form
Cross section of a prehistoric horse bone
Clam’s different colors
Mouse colon inhabited by human microbes
Mitochondrial of a cell
Water Lily bud’s cross section
Part of Rat’s brain
Moth’s mouth parts
Offspring of horseshoe worm
Lung artery cell
Rat tongue’s cross section
Closeup of ancient Chinese pottery
Plant producing crystals to defend itself
Engraving on a lens-based microscope from 1880
Cross section of fern
Bacterial DNA and probe
Gold and Titanium electrodes
Shells from the sea
Muse embryo
Colored neurons in fly larva
Beetle’s foreleg
Skin of a shelled animal
Pollens of a lily
Neural stem cells from human body
Fern Sorus at varying degrees of maturity
Mites on an insect pupae
3-D rendering of mouse fat
Bud of human breast gland
Shells from the pacific ocean
Nerves and blood vessels;s near the skin
