German photographer Ole Bielfeldt, 25, caught ink droplets suspended in mid-air and won the 2026 Nikon Small World competition. His image beat 1,802 other entries from 69 countries.
Source: nikonsmallworld.com
It started with a microscope in the attic
During the COVID-19 lockdown, Bielfeldt found an old microscope in his parents' attic.
There was no way to connect it to a camera, so he built an adapter out of a tube and some wood. He taught himself the rest through trial and error, making his own tools along the way.
Today he shares his experiments on macrofying his photography and videography brand, where everyday objects turn into something you wouldn't recognize.
Freezing a momentÂ
He wanted to see what actually happens when an inkjet printer prints.
The ink droplets moved too fast for a normal exposure. So he took the printer apart, kept the printhead still and moved the paper underneath it. Then he worked in a dark room and used a quick flash of light to freeze the droplets in mid-air.
It happens millions of times inside ordinary printers, and almost nobody has seen it.
Nikon Instruments spokesperson Eric Flem said Bielfeldt used a microscope objective in a new way to turn "a familiar object into something altogether new and previously unseen."
The beauty of noticing
There's no rare landscape or once-in-a-lifetime moment in this photo. It's a printer, the kind most of us walk past every day.
Most of the photos we end up loving are like that. The sunlight across your kitchen table. A handwritten note on the fridge. Someone was laughing before they knew you were taking the picture.
They don't feel important when you take them. Years later, they're the ones you go looking for.
Keeping them yours
Moments like these deserve to be kept, and kept private. Ente Photos is end-to-end encrypted, so not even we can see your photos. For 6+ years, people have trusted Ente with 800+ million memories.