Zoom In on Nature's Hidden Details: 11 Winners of Close-up Photographer of the Year Awards

Zoom in. Zoom in closer. Zoom in a little more, please. Close-ups reveal what distance can’t—details. A cute moth, a beaver approaching a dew-dripping spider web under golden light, a brown springtail trying to climb a lacelike cavern of white fungus, a tiny ladybug riding on the back of a blue sea squirt, a floating pondweed, and an elusive tree frog peering from behind a leaf.

Everything carries details of beauty only if one is attentive and curious enough to see them. In the seventh edition of the Close-up Photographer of the Year (CUPOTY) awards, photographers from across 63 countries submitted more than 12,000 entries recording surreal and ravishing details like these from across the world. The winner came from the “Underwater” category. Hint: It is a creature that lives underwater but doesn’t swim.

Here's a list of winners from all 11 categories.

1. Underwater

At first glance, Ross Gudgeon’s “Fractal Forest” looks like a stained-glass painting. But it is actually a close-up into the innards of a squishy cauliflower soft coral he observed in Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. Fanned out on a gradient of royal greens is a web of needle-like branches in brownish-red colors. Surrounding them is a vast cluster of what resemble yellow-white flowers with pin-like petals. To capture the marine organism from such an intimate perspective, he used an underwater probe lens. His photograph bagged the grand prize of around $3,395 (£2,500), winning in the “Underwater” category and overall.

2. Animals 

Several tadpoles rushing inside a gelatinous bluish-looking pouch were captured on camera one night when photographer Filippo Carugati ventured on a stroll in a Madagascar rainforest. This giant egg clutch dangling from a tree trunk made him stop in his tracks and arrest what he felt was a “cosmic appearance” on his camera. He named it “Amphibian Galaxy.”

3. Insects

This is Imre Potyó's winning image in the Insects category, named “Blue Army." The ghostly image recorded the moment when a storm of mayflies erupted over the Danube River in Hungary. Lured by the glittering city lights, a tempest of restless sinister-white flies enshrouded the blue sea, circled around for a while, and then perished on asphalt, per CNN.

4. Plants

Within the embers of endings lie new beginnings. Minghui Yuan’s “Rebirth From Destruction” captured this polarity of life in a pond in China. Floating amidst a splatter of dying lotus leaves, sprouting ferns represent aliveness. Punctuated within pink-green splotches of the decaying lotus are tiny, vivid green pulses of emerging new life.

5. Fungi & Slime Moulds

Valeria Zvereva’s category-winning photograph looks like a monochromatic abstract painting of a cavern with shadowy silhouettes of curvy rounded walls, but it is just an extreme close-up of a mushroom photographed in Moscow, Russia. Fittingly titled “Mushroom in ‘Nude’ Style,” the photograph zooms into the deepest, darkest nudities of a papery reproductive part of the fungus called “lamellae.”

6. Butterflies and Dragonflies

Some individuals know how to establish their territory; others know how to dominate it. For instance, this Camberwell beauty butterfly in Pål Hermansen’s “Butterfly Flash” got attracted to a sweet leaky sap in a birch tree’s trunk that was attacked by goat moth larvae. The butterfly fanned out its wings, studded with blue dots, and latched on to the spot to prevent rivals from approaching it, an innocent way nature defends its survival.

7. Arachnids

Somewhere in Hong Kong, a hungry lynx spider executed a wicked strategy. When the hot-dry afternoon of a day shifted to spring rains, and some termites gathered for a mating dance, the spider pounced upon them, gobbling up at least two for “Dinner,” an apt title given to the photoshoot by Artur Tomaszek. In addition to the spider’s eager eyes, the image zooms into its spindly long legs that look like stalks of glassy green grass.

8. Invertebrate Portrait

Laurent Hesemans’s “Good Boy” encapsulates the portrait of a curious silkworm moth, likely from the Bombycid family. Captured in Costa Rica, the image shows the moth gazing right at the camera with large black button-like cartoonish eyes and two feathery antennas leaping from its head that give it the appearance of Harry Potter’s wizard elf, Dobby.

9. Intimate Landscape

There is a fine line between solitude and loneliness, and Sho Hoshino’s “Dreamy State” expresses it to the finest. Shot in Japan, the image displays a tree trapped in a cluster of rime ice. While the frosty clusters indicate a sense of abandonment, the contrast of scattered dark brown branches with the pink mist of sunrise in the background expresses hope.  

10. Studio Art 

Paul Kenny’s photograph “Copper Works No. 25 – 2024” demonstrates that pollution doesn’t just suffocate humans. It also assaults someone as innocent as a copper plate. Lying in what looks like a small bog engulfed in grasses, the distressed copper plate resembles a waxing crescent moon, with a crescent portion of it smeared, displaying the marks left by the attacks of chemical stressors.

11. Young (Under 18s) 

Fourteen-year-old Rithved Girish was on a summer holiday in Kerala, India, when he spotted a secret colony of stingless bees clinging to the tube-shaped mouth of a waxy nest, likely made from rotting tree bark. Called “Guardians of the Hive,” the photograph captures a private moment from the busy lives of these leading pollinators.

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