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

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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