Nikon's Small World photomicrography competition winners show what the naked eye can't see in the new 2005 calendar
For 30 years, Nikon Instruments has hosted an annual photography contest for microscopists.
The Nikon International Small World Competition is dedicated to furthering creativity and excellence in photographic and digital micrography.
By combining microscopy and photography, a photomicrographer is able to capture an image of the world that the naked eye cannot see.
The subject matter in the 2004 contest was unrestricted and any type of light microscopy technique was acceptable.
This year's contest drew entrants from 46 countries, and from a diverse range of academic and professional disciplines.
Entries submitted to Nikon were judged by an independent panel of experts who rated them on the basis of originality, informational content, technical proficiency and visual impact.
The Small World Calendar 2005 displays the top 20 prize winners and thumbnail images of all 17 honourable mentions from this years competition.
The 2004 first prize winner, Seth Coe-Sullivan, thought he was just having a bad week at work when he couldn't get his microscope image of quantum dot nanocrystals to come out right.
Instead of nice, flat films, he captured the patterns of the nanocrystals.
But when the PhD candidate in electrical engineering showed the images to fellow researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they saw his 'failure' as something else: art. "The natural world is what created the art, much more than I did," says Coe-Sullivan, who is studying uses of light emission from the quantum dots in devices such as light bulbs and cell phones.
"I was just there to observe it."
