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Travelling the universe at this scale seems as important and amazing to me as travelling to a distant star. The igniting matchstick image has so much going on!

One cringe though ... the images all seem excessively post-processed to me. Unrealistically saturated, contrasted, sharpened, etc. The colour, especially, just seems over the top and I feel like seeing these microscopic subjects enlarged is mind-blowing enough without the postprocessing distraction which makes it seem less real.

Anyways, amazing images! Thanks!

3 comments

One thing to note is that the fluorescence images like https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2023-photomicrogra... are false color. In those systems, you typically excite a specific fluorophore, one at a time (once for each type in the sample), and read out the result with a monochromatic camera through frequency-specific filters. The final image is composited with the grayscale intensity mapped to color value.

I don't think the microscopy images underwent sharpening, although I'm not certain.

My friend who works in the field prefers to look at individual color planes in monochrome (no color at all) rather than the super-saturated composites.

They can be somewhat true color if you reconstruct the image with the appropriate human perceived color for the wavelength the dye emits, doesn't work well for multiple dyes with close wavelengths.

I'm of two minds about the processing... if adding lots of artificial color, sharpening, and contrast brings out the detail(s) the researcher is looking for without actually altering them, then it seems like fair game.

But yes, the raw photos would be nice to see as well, just for comparison's sake. That may be easier said than done given the prevalence of image stacking.

To my untrained eye I don't understand why #1 is #1, #2 has more interesting details and demonstrates much more skills. Perhaps I don't understand the evaluation parameters though, #1 is probably a bigger technical achievement.

Since it's a photomicrography competition, 20X magnification vs 2.5X may play a factor in the judging?

Not sure it demonstrates much more skills (lighting a match vs. extracting an optical nerve and differentiating it to proteins, glials and vasculature).

I meant photography skills, clearly most people can strike a match.

It's probably not as simple as striking a match.

Note that the list of techniques used for the matchstick includes "image stacking", which I thought involves multiple exposures, but a burning match is not quite a static subject that would remain constant across multiple shots. I am curious what setup they have done to pull it off.

Related, this photographer has videos of macro shots of burning match elsewhere:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AOql9Ie9zSE

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxBKzO0IjXd/