Winners of the 2026 Photomicrography Competition
Ok, I’m gonna use the word gobsmacking here because I think it’s completely appropriate. This image of an inkjet printer laying down ink on a piece of paper is gobsmacking.
Like what?! You can check out photographer Ole Bielfeldt’s behind-the-scenes process on Instagram; he built a whole custom rig to capture this composite image.
The biggest challenge was speed and lighting.
The printhead, in the printer, moves at a very high speed over the paper. Simultaneously, the ink droplets get injected at around 20 m/s. So to capture the ink droplets mid air and get my lens close enough, this required me to build a custom setup where, instead of the printhead moving over the paper, the paper moved below the printhead. This allowed me to keep the nozzles in focus while printing.
As the max shutter speed of 1/8000s on my camera is way too slow, I used a high speed flash setup. Here the flash acts as the effective shutter, freezing the droplets mid air. I then used focus stacking to capture the depth of the scene.
Bielfeldt’s took the top spot in the Nikon Small World 2026 Photomicrography Competition. The top 20 images are all quite something…here are a couple more of my favorites, from Justin Theodore Benttinen and Dr. Francisco Lázaro-Diéguez.
(via curious about everything)
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