Up Close With The 2012 Olympus Bioscapes Microscopic Photography Challenge
Fourth Place, Crab Claw Claw of a crustacean amphipode. Dr. Christian Sardet and Mr. Sharif MirshakThe year's best microscope-assisted science photo wasn't actually a photograph at all, but a video. Perhaps it's a sign of just how far imaging technology has come in the last decade that the overall winner of the Olympus Bioscapes Digital Imaging competition--an annual microscopic photography contest now in its tenth year--wasn't a still photograph but a video. Amid a range of stunning visuals captured via dozens of imaging and microscopy techniques, Ralph Grimm's video of colonial rotifers--micrscopic beings that sustain themselves on dead bacteria and the like--took top prize, the first time a video has done so. More to that point, this Grimm is neither a professional videographer nor a research scientist with access to a lab full of top-shelf imaging equipment. Rather, he's a 45-year-old Australian high school teacher who simply realized that the lilypads in...