Melville, N.Y. – October 21, 2026 -- A student in Cologne, Germany, has won the 52nd annual Nikon Small World photomicrography competition with a photo of ink droplets suspended in midair inside a printer as it prints. Nikon Instruments announced the winners, with first place going to Ole Bielfeldt.
Bielfeldt rebuilt a printer so the paper moves instead of the printhead
Bielfeldt wanted to know how a printer places ink onto paper so precisely. His first attempts failed. The printhead moved too fast to keep a small area in focus, and the droplets were too fast for his camera's shutter speed.
He did not buy expensive gear. Instead, he reverse-engineered the printer so the paper moved beneath a stationary printhead. Working in a dark room, he used a flash to freeze the droplets in midair, so the brief burst of light acted as the effective shutter. The image was shot through a 20X microscope objective using slow-motion and image stacking techniques.
"It turned out I already had everything I needed," Bielfeldt said.
A lockdown attic find started the hobby
Bielfeldt's path began during the COVID-19 lockdown, when he found an old school microscope in his parents' attic. He built an adapter from a tube and wood to connect it to a camera borrowed from his father. He now runs macrofying, a photography and videography brand, and posts behind-the-scenes videos of his process.
He said he rejected using AI to generate his images. He prefers classic techniques such as focus stacking, Photoshop and retouching to make a striking image of something that actually exists.
Eric Flem, senior manager of communications and CRM at Nikon Instruments, said the win shows the microscope is a creative tool as well as a scientific one.
A jumping spider and mouse neurons take second and third
John-Oliver Dum of Bendorf, Germany, placed second with a jumping spider (Salticus scenicus) carrying pollen, shot at 20X with image stacking.
Third place went to Kaelin Wulf and Rachel Flannery of the Allen Institute in Seattle for neurons in an expanded mouse brain. They used expansion microscopy, fluorescence and light sheet imaging at 5X.
The top ten includes a pen tip, a daisy and a wasp emerging from a chrysalis
- 4th: Justin Theodore Benttinen of Berkeley, California, for the tip of a ballpoint pen.
- 5th: Mike Crutchley of Pembrokeshire, Wales, for the inner structure of a closed daisy.
- 6th: Eric Epstein of Brooklyn, New York, for Hemitrichia slime mold spore structures.
- 7th: Dr. Bruno Cisterna and Dr. Eric Vitriol of Augusta, Georgia, for human neurons reprogrammed from skin cells.
- 8th: Dr. Marcel Clemens of Verona, Italy, for pencil lead during a high-voltage electrical discharge.
- 9th: Dr. Francisco Lázaro-Diéguez of the Bronx, New York, for a dedifferentiated liver endothelial cell.
- 10th: Michael Parra Puentes of Bogotá, Colombia, for a parasitoid wasp emerging from a butterfly chrysalis.
Four judges from science and museums picked the winners
The 2026 panel included Joe Dragavon of the University of Colorado Boulder, Quinten Geldhof of the Museum of Science in Boston, science writer Corey S. Powell, and Meredith Sagolla of Genentech.