Some amazing photomicrography

Nikon holds its Small World competition each year in the field of photomicrography, or microscope photography. The 2009 winners have just been announced.

Fifth place overall went to Bruno Vellutini for this effort:

A young, hungry sea star appears to open its mouth wide as its transparent tube feet grasp for morsels. Marine biologist Bruno Vellutini of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil said the sea star, or starfish, was imaged at 40 times magnification shortly after it had metamorphosed into a juvenile. He said he was lucky to find the juvenile seastar in the plankton samples he collected while looking for sand dollar larvae for his master’s thesis last year.

“Scientific images don’t need to be beautiful,” he said. “To take a good picture, you need patience to prepare light, make sure everything is clean. It takes a lot of effort to create a technically nice image.” But, he said, taking beautiful pictures “makes research more fun.”

Fourth place went to James Hayden for this image:

When a former colleague sent him a section of an anglerfish ovary, James E. Hayden of The Wistar Institute came up with the idea of looking at the autofluorescence of the tissue in two colors. His vibrant swirling photomicrograph of developing oocytes, or unfertilized eggs, as they move along the spiral of an anglerfish's ovary came in fourth.

Mr. Hayden said he is drawn to both photographic art and science. “Most microscopists have a streak of artist in them. It’s hard not to. You’re looking at things through a microscope that most people don’t see. The nascent artist in you sort of peeks its head up.”

Third place was taken by Dr. Pedro Barrios-Perez for this electronic composition:

Dr. Pedro Barrios-Perez used brightfield to capture the wrinkled photoresist magnified 200 times in his winning image. Dr. Barrios-Perez of the Institute for Microstructural Sciences at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, won third place with a failed attempt to develop a photoresist pattern on a semiconductor.

“These pictures are taken out of my interest in art,” said Dr. Barrios-Perez. “If I show it to my boss, he just says, ‘Throw the sample away.’ I thought that it looked like a face with a fire that was warming up my days.” He added that the particular result “cannot be reproduced – some of this stuff just happens.”

Second place was taken by Gerd A. Guenther of Germany:

Not all of the winning images were created by scientists using expensive state-of-the-art equipment. Gerd A. Guenther is an organic farmer from Düsseldorf, Germany where produces vegetables, potatoes and hay for horses. His stunning picture of a thin cross section of the stem of a Sonchus asper blossom, a yellow blooming wildflower often found on farmland, won second prize. The plant was magnified 150 times, bringing a new perspective to the wonders of nature.

"The remarkable contrast between the red hats of the plant hairs and the green stem in combination with the white stems thrilled me," said Mr. Guenther.

And the winner of the 2009 competition was Dr. Heiti Paves of Estonia, with this photograph:

Arabidopsis thaliana is the first plant to have its genome fully sequenced and is commonly used as a model in scientific research. But it was the unusually artistic appearance of the winning shot that inspired photomicrographer and plant biologist Dr. Heiti Paves of the Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia to enter the image into the 35-year-old competition.

Dr. Paves has studied chicken embryo development, embryonic neurons and plants, all under a microscope. His first-place image, using confocal microscopy to document the anther of a tiny thale cress plant, was a byproduct of his research on motor proteins that move organelles in plant cells.

According to Dr. Paves, besides being “nice-looking plant organs,” anthers were a good subject because “they do not move very fast… The picture of my dreams should bring out motility of living cell, like a sports photograph.”

You'll find all 137 entries in the 2009 competition at its Web site. Highly recommended viewing.

Peter