Winning Close-Up Photos Show Life in Sync With Water

They may not sound as majestic as herds of elephants or flocks of migrating birds, but as these photos attest, there’s incredible beauty to be found in moss springtails and slime molds. Life is just as dramatic at a smaller scale, and, like in the macro world, water is key to survival.

For the Close-up Photographer of the Year Challenge: Water, photographers were invited to submit their photos showing water—and the life it supports—in intimate detail. Here are some of the finalists and winners of the competition.

A springtail (Neanura muscorum) covered in dew, sitting on a piece of dead wood. The critter remained still, allowing the photographer to take the highly magnified image, which was then sharpened with noise reduction software.

A pond in Vermont getting ice crystals on its surface, the first of the season.

Another finalist is this shot of fruiting bodies of Physarum album, a slime mold. The colony stands at about 0.08 inches (2 millimeters) tall, and raindrops are suspended at their tops.

This ethereal shot of love-in-the-mist (Nigella damascena) captures the flower’s delicate beauty; small water droplets cling to the flower’s stamens and petals, making it look like a piece of Tiffany glassware.

Another finalist is this shot of a frog peeking out from a pond’s surface. The photographer then flipped the image, warping the viewer’s sense of what’s real.

Dead moths clutter a spring near Grövelsjön, Sweden. “It looked to me as if the moths were still dancing over a meadow somewhere, taking one last flight,” said the photographer, Harald Cederlund, in a CUPOTY release.

The second-place image is this remarkable shot of wild poppies and tiarella flowers frozen in boiled water. The photographer placed the frozen block of material in front of a light box, illuminating details of the flower petals and casting the thick plant stems in a darker light.

A snake tasting the air. The snake appears on an otherwise uniform, light brown pond surface—akin to a periscope poking up out of the water.

A damselfly absolutely covered in dew in Shrewsbury. This shot was taken around 3 a.m., when the damselfly was resting. In its still state, the photographer was able to capture the animal in remarkable detail.

Another finalist is this image of a plastic bottle that a colony of goose barnacles decided to call home. They were found on the United Kingdom’s Chesil Beach, but the photographer relocated the objects to Portland Harbour to photograph them with less nuisance.

This shot of a dragonfly took third place. It took about 100 attempts, the photographer said, but he finally managed to get a shot of the insect with its wings spread wide.

The competition winner was this photo of a newt feasting on frog eggs in a German stream. The camera was put in underwater housing and the photo was taken looking up, with an LED light above the surface to give the amphibian a silhouette.

A clump of mushrooms in the United Kingdom’s Marbury Country Park. The photographer used a mist spray to give the effect of rain on the fungi.