Ole Bielfeldt wins Nikon Small World microscopic photography contest

German photographer Ole Bielfeldt has won the 2026 Nikon Small World competition. His winning entry features a microscopic image of ink droplets frozen in midair as an inkjet printer deposits them onto paper.

To capture the high-speed process, Bielfeldt deconstructed the printer so the paper moved under a stationary printhead. He used a dark room and a flash to act as a shutter, allowing him to freeze the droplets which were moving faster than a standard camera shutter speed. Bielfeldt, who taught himself photomicrography during the COVID-19 lockdown, utilized a custom microscopic camera rig with 20x magnification and did not use AI in his work.

Bielfeldt beat out 1,802 other entries from 69 different countries. Other notable winners in the contest included second-place finisher John-Oliver Dum of Germany, who photographed a jumping spider, and third-place winners Kaelin Wulf and Rachel Flannery from the Allen Institute, who captured neurons in a mouse brain.