Small World

brown hydra with ingested mosquito larva

My entries for the 2011 Nikon Small World photo contest are in. The contest is open to photographs taken through a light microscope. I began photographing images though my microscope several years ago when I was preparing a microscopy science lab for the local 4th grade class. I volunteered in my son’s class preparing and teaching one science lab a month. Most of these students had never used a microscope before and often had trouble finding what was under the microscope. They just didn’t know what they were looking for. By showing them pictures of what they should be seeing, they were able to get started much more quickly.

The Small World contest is in it’s 37th year. Each year Nikon posts a gallery of the best images online which you can browse here and see some truly amazing images taken with various microscopy techniques. My images are more simple than most of these as I limit my work to common live specimens at fairly low magnification that beginning microscopists might encounter. You can see more examples of my work here.