15 Winning Photos From the 2021 Close-Up Photographer of the Year Competition

The annual Close-up Photographer of the Year contest asks us to decelerate and think about the world by means of a extra discerning lens. It’s sage recommendation, as these unimaginable zoomed-in photographs attest.

The annual contest, based in 2018 and accomplished in affiliation with Affinity Photo, celebrates the perfect close-up, macro, and microphotography of the previous yr.

“One of the great joys of close-up photography is when you approach a subject with an air of curiosity so that even the most mundane object or scene becomes captivating,” Tracy Calder, a co-founder of the competitors, wrote to me in an e mail. “This year I’ve been astonished by images of spiders in their rainbow-coloured webs, bottles transformed into seascapes, and slime moulds erupting out of dead vegetation.”

Nine classes had been included for this yr’s working of the competition, together with a brand new Underwater class. A panel of knowledgeable judges evaluated 1000’s of photographs submitted from internationally. Here are our favourite zoomed-in photographs from the previous yr.