Printer Ink Gets 1st Place in Nikon Microscope Contest

Ole Bielfeldt never looked at his printer the same way after he saw what it does up close. The student photographer from Cologne, Germany, just won first place in the 52nd Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition by capturing the messy, magical moment when an inkjet printer deposits ink onto paper.

"It's such a crazy thing that just moves super fast while simultaneously shooting out these little droplets," Bielfeldt tells Smithsonian magazine. His winning image shows globs of ink stretching down through a fog of flash, dripping onto white paper to spell out letters.

The project took two years to perfect. Bielfeldt had to reverse-engineer his printer, setting the printhead still and moving the paper beneath it instead. He then captured the ink-injecting process using flash and custom-built equipment.

What surprised him most was how chaotic the ink nozzles looked under the microscope. "It's almost like in nature, very all over the place, while still following kind of a structure," he says. The image now graces the Instagram account of this experimental photographer, who has built more than one million followers by turning his lens on everyday objects.

The Bright Side

Bielfeldt's win highlights a wonderful truth about our world: beauty hides in plain sight. More than 1,800 entries from 69 countries competed this year, and many other winners also found wonder in the ordinary. Justin Theodore Benttinen took fourth place with a shimmering ballpoint pen tip magnified 20 times. "I just thought it looked cool," he says.

Other winners captured biological marvels instead. Marine biology student Svenja Carolin Kling placed 11th with a 20-day-old sea urchin larva glittering with blue fluorescence. "I basically 'made' this urchin myself," she explains.

The competition did face controversy this year when the video contest winner lost his title after an investigation found he didn't follow proper protocols regarding artificial intelligence. Nikon responded with updated rules to address rapidly evolving imaging technology.

Bielfeldt says he doesn't mind A.I. when properly disclosed, but he prefers to keep it away from his art. "For me, it's a great tool to do stuff that I don't want to do, but I want to keep it away from the stuff that I have fun doing," he explains.

Judge Quinten Geldhof from Boston's Museum of Science captured why Bielfeldt's printer image resonated: "The beautiful thing about microscopy is that it lets us discover the incredible invisible worlds around us."

All 20 winning images can be viewed on the Nikon Small World website, reminding us that extraordinary beauty exists everywhere we look, if we just zoom in close enough.