A moth stares into the camera with what can only be described as a melancholy expression. Its large, dark eyes and drooping antennae give it an almost puppy-like quality—hence the photograph's title, "Good Boy." Laurent Hesemans captured this member of the Bombycid family in Costa Rica, and his image just won first place in the Invertebrate Portrait category of the 2025 Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition. The photograph does something most nature photography doesn't: it makes you feel empathy for an insect.
The Art of Seeing Small
Macro photography operates at scales where human intuition fails. A crinoid shrimp, barely visible to divers swimming past, becomes the subject of an entire composition when Luis Arpa photographs it clinging to a feather star in Bali's waters. His image "Featherhome" earned third place in the Underwater category by revealing how perfectly the shrimp mimics its host—matching not just color but the intricate patterns of the feather star's arms. Most people never see this creature. Fewer still notice its camouflage. The camera, pushed close enough, makes the invisible unavoidable.
The Close-Up Photographer of the Year competition, now in its seventh year, exists specifically to surface these hidden worlds. The 2025 winners, announced in February, represent 647 shortlisted photographs across 11 categories—from Arachnids to Fungi & Slime Moulds. The tagline "Revealing the hidden wonder of the world" isn't marketing fluff. It's a precise description of what happens when photographers point their lenses at subjects measured in millimeters.
Beyond Simple Magnification
What separates compelling macro photography from mere documentation is the same thing that separates any good photograph from a snapshot: intention. The competition's structure reflects this. Categories like Invertebrate Portrait and Studio Art demand that photographers treat their tiny subjects with the same compositional rigor normally reserved for human portraiture or still life.
Consider what "portrait" means when applied to an invertebrate. Hesemans didn't simply magnify a moth. He found an angle and lighting that revealed personality—or at least the suggestion of one. The technical details matter here: macro lenses at high magnification create depth of field measured in millimeters. Getting both eyes in focus requires precision. Making the viewer care about the result requires something else entirely.
The competition accepts images made with microscopes, expanding the scale from macro to micro. This inclusion acknowledges that revelation doesn't stop at the limits of conventional lenses. Some winning images show structures invisible to the naked eye under any circumstances. Others, like the underwater entries, capture subjects that exist at human scale but live in environments where close approach is difficult or impossible.
The Economics of Attention
The prize structure tells a story about the niche macro photography occupies. The overall winner receives £2,500 plus equipment—meaningful money, but not life-changing. Category winners get £250 each. The Young photographer category winner receives a Sigma 105mm macro lens worth £700, which is telling. The competition assumes its younger participants need equipment more than cash, and that a macro lens represents a gateway to continued practice.
More significant than the monetary prizes is the digital book: 373 pages featuring 647 photographs, plus 241 tips from photographers. All entrants receive a free copy, normally priced at £19.99. The competition functions as much as a community and educational resource as a contest. Macro photography requires specialized knowledge—how to manage depth of field, how to light subjects without casting harsh shadows, how to approach insects without disturbing them. The accumulated expertise matters more than any single prize.
Partners like Affinity Photo, Zerene Stacker, and Cygnustech Diffuser reveal the technical infrastructure behind these images. Zerene Stacker, for instance, combines multiple photos taken at different focal distances into a single image with impossible depth of field. What looks like a single exposure often represents dozens of frames, carefully aligned and merged. The "reveal" in macro photography sometimes requires computational assistance.
What Small Subjects Teach
The competition's category list reads like a taxonomy of overlooked life: Insects, Arachnids, Fungi & Slime Moulds. These aren't charismatic megafauna. They're the organisms people step over, swat away, or fail to notice entirely. Macro photography makes a case for their visual worth, but it does something more interesting too—it demonstrates how much complexity exists at every scale.
A slime mould, magnified, shows structure. A jumping spider's face reveals multiple eyes, each catching light differently. The feather star's shrimp proves that camouflage operates at levels of detail humans can't process in real-time. These aren't just pretty pictures. They're evidence that paying attention at any scale yields information.
The Accessibility Problem
Macro photography has a barrier to entry that landscape or street photography doesn't: you need specialized equipment to get started, and expertise to use it well. A macro lens costs hundreds of pounds. Focus stacking software requires learning curve. Photographing living insects demands patience and often specific habitats.
Yet the competition's growth—647 shortlisted entries in year seven—suggests the barriers aren't insurmountable. Smartphones now include macro modes, though they can't match dedicated equipment. Online communities share techniques. The competition itself, by publishing technical details alongside winning images, functions as a teaching tool.
Moths With Feelings
Returning to that melancholy moth: what Hesemans accomplished was making viewers see an insect as something other than alien. The anthropomorphizing is obvious and probably scientifically indefensible. Moths don't have feelings. They don't look sad. But the photograph works because it triggers the same recognition we experience with human faces. The eyes, the symmetry, the direct gaze—these elements bypass our usual response to insects.
That's the real revelation in macro photography. Not just that small things are beautiful when magnified, but that proximity changes perception. Get close enough to anything—a moth, a shrimp, a slime mould—and it stops being background. It becomes subject. The camera doesn't just magnify. It insists on attention. In a world of overlooked organisms, that insistence matters more than the magnification itself.