I was delighted to find out that I have won Gold 🏆 at the 𝟏𝟏𝐭𝐡 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐭 𝐏𝐡𝐨𝐭𝐨𝐠𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐡𝐲 𝐀𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟓 in the Nature professional category. For the second year running!
Last year for my macro flower portraits and this year for these Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) microscopy images of the exoskeletons of diatoms on samples of plastic fibres from local waterways.
One of my favourite stories when I was a small kid was called “Horton hears a Who” by Dr Seuss about a kindly elephant called Horton who befriends tiny creatures who live on a speck of dust in a community called Whoville. It’s a humanitarian story about big guys looking out for little guys and carries a great message. But I was also fascinated by the idea of worlds within worlds. Our own world is a speck of dust within our galaxy of 100 billion suns and there are 2 trillion galaxies in just the observable universe. But we can look the other way too. A kind of reverse astronomy where we journey into “inner space” to discover worlds we can only see with a microscope.
These images are of diatoms. A microbial life form just a few microns in size. I have been fortunate to collaborate with PhD researcher Daniel Jolly at UEA who has been looking at diatoms in connection with a wider thesis on an environmental theme. These images have been captured using a Scanning Electron Microscope. SEM technology can magnify up to 500,000 times. The captured images are grayscale because they represent variations in electron intensity, not colour. I have colourised them to further abstract the eerie, other- worldly nature of these tiny landscapes to immerse us in the microscopic aquatic world of the diatom.
Click to see all images:
