Nature
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Come closer, a bit more, a bit more, that’s perfect. It’s time to celebrate the winners of the seventh iteration of Close-up Photographer of the Year with even more spectacular photography that truly reveals hidden worlds and gets up close and personal with its subjects.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.This year's competition attracted over 12,000 entries from more than 60 countries. The competition covers 11 categories featuring animals, fungi and slime molds, studio art and more. The judges whittled down the competition into the top 100 images before selecting their winners and runners up.
This year's grand prize winner was Australian photographer Ross Gudgeon for his stunning image Fractal Forest (pictured top) taken in the Lembeh Strait, Indonesia inside a cauliflower soft coral. As well as the competition's top award, Gudgeon walks away with a £2,500 prize.
“By carefully threading the lens through the coral’s branches without disturbing them, I was able to photograph the subject from the inside looking-out, offering a different view of a common marine organism,” he said in a statement seen by IFLScience.
Another finalist in the Underwater category was Richard Condlyffe’s image of a ladybug amphipod, also photographed in Indonesia. “This particular individual was on an underwater wall at about 40 feet deep, which meant careful buoyancy control was critical to being steady enough to focus the camera and take the shot. By using a super-macro converter and open aperture I was able to fully blur the pinkish-red soft coral background to create this simple composition,” he said.
In the plant category, floating pondweed looks almost like a painting in Sonia Fantini’s images taken near her home in Italy. “I went back several times and eventually chose the shot taken on an overcast day, without any interfering shadows."
The second place image in the Fungi and Slime Moulds category captured a group of tiny 1.5 millimeter tall Cribraria rufa in Buckinghamshire, England. “'I was pleased to find this group of Cribraria rufa slime moulds growing so close together, as they are more usually found singly or spaced apart. A focus bracket of 103 shots was taken to create the image,” he said.
In the Young competition category, third place was awarded to Jameson Hawkins-Kimmel, who at just 14 years old captured this portrait of a Cuban tree frog in his own backyard in Florida.
"This was the toughest competition yet," says CUPOTY co-founder Tracy Calder. "The winning image embodies everything close-up photography can achieve – it shows us a perspective we've never seen before and reveals hidden beauty in a familiar subject. The judges were captivated."
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