Nikon Small World 2025 – It’s a Small World

Above: 1st Place, Zhang You, Kunming, Yunnan, China. Rice weevil (Sitophilus oryzae) on a grain of rice.
5X (Objective Lens Magnification).

It’s the 51st year of Nikon’s Small World photography competition. This year there were 1,925 entries from 77 countries, celebrating the microscopic world of life and the tech that has increasingly shrunk to this level.

The first images were released in 1975, attracting entries from a diverse range of fields, including photography, biology, chemistry, and metrology, to name a few. Since then our ability to record things at a microscopic level has only improved, to the point that in 2011 a Small World in Motion video competition was spun up. Unfortunately for us the printed page doesn’t do animated GIFs very well so we’ll have to contend with the static version of the competition.