This image is mind bending. It looks like a spaceship hovering over a frozen lake at dusk, and it’s actually an ordinary inkjet printer putting a few letters on a sheet of paper.
It’s by Ole Bielfeldt, a 25-year-old design student in Cologne who posts his work as macrofying, and it just took first place in the 2026 Nikon Small World photomicrography competition, ahead of more than 1,800 entries from 69 countries. Give it a minute, because there’s a lot going on in there. Start at the top.
The printhead’s nozzles bulge out like a row of glossy eyes, each one ringed in light. Behind them the copper traces of the circuitry run off in tidy orange lines, like a city seen from a plane at night.
Ink hangs from two of the nozzles in long threads, and loose droplets float below, each about a tenth the width of a human hair. Bielfeldt explains that a tiny heater in the printhead flashes the ink to around 300°C, and the vapor bubble it makes is what fires each droplet out.
And the paper stops looking like paper. It’s a snowfield, and the dots sitting on it like puddles come from the word he had the printer spell over and over: “macro,” a nod to his handle.
The winning shot is one frame from a whole series he posted as a thread on X, and the rest are just as fun. Tap through and keep going. There’s a clip of a single dot pattern forming next to his fingertip for scale (“Yes, I edited my fingerprint just to be sure”), and at the end the printer prints a picture of itself!
He had to take the printer apart
Bielfeldt simply wanted to know how a printer gets ink onto a page so precisely. He took apart his first printer back in May 2024 and kept coming back to the idea until he cracked it this year. His first attempts failed. The printhead moved too fast to stay in focus, and the droplets moved too fast for his camera’s shutter. He figured he’d need expensive equipment. Turns out he already had what he needed.
So he rebuilt the printer so the head stays put and the paper slides along underneath it, which kept the nozzles in focus. Then came the speed problem. The droplets leave the nozzles at around 20 meters per second, and even his camera’s fastest shutter, 1/8000 of a second, couldn’t stop them. So he worked in a dark room and let a high-speed flash do the shutter’s job, freezing the droplets mid-air, then focus stacked the frames to get the whole scene sharp. He walks through the entire build on Instagram, from bare rails to the final shot. Swipe through it, it’s great!
“It’s like it was magic, and I didn’t understand it, but now I do,” he told the organizers. We love that line. We’ve been on a bit of a small-things kick lately, from what salt looks like up close to the eye being the one part of your brain you can see, and this might be our favorite yet.
A microscope from the attic
It all started during the COVID lockdowns, when he found an old microscope in his parents’ attic. There was no way to attach a camera, so he built an adapter out of a tube and some wood and taught himself the rest by trial and error.
This isn’t his first time on the Small World podium either. In 2022 he placed sixth with the soot rising off a candle flame (we ran it in our 2022 roundup), and in 2023 he took second with a match catching fire against its box. Both of those were shot at 2.5x. The printer needed 20x, which tells you just how small those nozzles are.
There’s one more reason this win feels good. Nikon had to pull the top prize from its sister video contest, Small World in Motion, this year after deciding the winning entry broke its rules on generative AI. Bielfeldt does it the slow way, with homemade rigs, focus stacking and a lot of failed attempts.
Go see more of his experiments on Instagram at @macrofying, and the rest of this year’s winners in Nikon’s 2026 gallery. Images courtesy of Nikon Small World.
