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)
London’s Natural History Museum has announced the winners of the 2026 Wildlife Photographer of the Year, a competition that has been going since 1965. You can see a gallery of all the winners on the competition website (and also places like The Guardian and The Atlantic.)
Photos above by Kutub Uddin, Amelie Davis, Michał Michalski, James Lewin, and Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas.
The winners of the 2026 Epson International Pano awards were announced recently, featuring some of the best panoramic photography in the world. Alan Taylor at the Atlantic shared some of his favorites and I shared some of mine above. Starting at the top, photos by Xuecheng Liu, Shimon Perlstein, Tomás Sánchez Ruiz, Preeti & Prashant Chacko, and Daniel Viñé Garcia.
P.S. In case you were wondering about the aspect ratio of panoramic images: according to the submission rules, the image’s longest side needs to be at least twice the length as the shortest side.
The Comedy Wildlife Awards have announced the finalists for the 2026 competition and, well, these awards never miss. You can almost hear the background music for some of these…
The best aerial photography reminds us that we don’t have to go all the way to space to experience a small helping of the overview effect. The 2026 Aerial Photographer of the Year contest celebrates the best photos taken from the air; here are a few of my favorites:
Photo credits:
- Paweł Jagiełło, Ak-Say Canyon, Kyrgyzstan.
- Azim Khan Ronnie, a rowing team in Switzerland.
- Chin Leong Teo, the Park Royal Hotel, Singapore.
- Azim Khan Ronnie, workers harvesting/drying red chili peppers, Bangladesh.
- Savadmon Avalachamveettil, the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage crowd, India.
- Marcin Zając, Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco.
- Chin Leong Teo, crosswalk in Tokyo.
- Daniel Viñé Garcia, Cono de Arita, Argentina.
You can see more photos from the winning photographers at the contest’s website, Colossal, PetaPixel, and DIY Photography. (via colossal)
Socials & More