American actress and singer Vanessa Hudgens poses on the red carpet during the Oscars arrivals at the 94th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 27, 2022. (Photo by Mike Blake/Reuters)

Third place: the rear leg, claw and respiratory trachea of a louse (Haematopinus suis). (Photo by Frank Reiser/Nassau Community College/Nikon Small World Photomicrography 2021)

Creative imagery, gold winner: Sprats and Bread, Ruediger Schulz, Germany. (Photo by Ruediger Schulz/2021 Bird Photographer of the Year)

American model and socialite Jordyn Woods strikes a glamorous pose for Sacai in the last decade of June 2023. (Photo by jordynwoods/Instagram)

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets – it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

Photo: Honorable Mention. “Snow crystal, illuminated with colored lights (5x)”. (Photo by Dr. Kenneth Libbrecht, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Department of Physics, Pasadena, California, USA)

A macro view of an ant taking a sip from a water droplet on the edge of a flower in Obihiro, Japan. Animal-Lover Miki Asai has gone a step beyond feeding bread to the ducks – by syringe-feeding water to tiny ants. The office worker from Obihiro City, Japan, squirts droplets near the tiny insects and then uses a macro lens to capture quenching their thirst. The amateur photographer started capturing these images near her house in July 2013 after spotting an ant struggling in the rain. (Photo by Miki Asai/Barcroft Media)

European bisons (also known as Wisent) at the Bison farm in Muczne, southeastern Poland, 30 December 2018. The Bison farm is a continuation of bison breeding in Bieszczady, which was started in 1963. Here visitors can admire the bison of Bialowieza-Caucasian line, also called the mountain race. The European Bison is the national animal of Poland. (Photo by Darek Delmanowicz/EPA/EFE)

In this Thursday, May 31, 2018 photo, a temporary worker using a lantern collects white asparagus from a field in Caparroso, around 85 km (52 miles) from Pamplona, northern Spain. Dubbed the “white gold” of these northern Spanish farms because of their color and the high price they fetch in markets and restaurants around the world, the stringy delicacy is planted every fall and picked each year between April and June, at the height of the spring. (Photo by Alvaro Barrientos/AP Photo)