Five stunning images from the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards

Sometimes beauty is found with a shift in perspective. These gorgeous images are among the winners of the latest Close-up Photographer of Year contest, an international photography competition dedicated to unveiling nature’s hidden wonders.

Peer through the delicate pink branches of a cauliflower soft coral in the main image, above, which won the underwater category in the awards. Photographer Ross Gudgeon captured this ethereal shot in the blue waters of the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia by placing a tiny camera inside the spongy structure. “I carefully threaded the [lens] through the branches of the soft coral so as not to damage them, creating an image looking from the inside out,” said Gudgeon in a statement.

This lynx spider, above, is about to tuck into a handful of unlucky termites. Artur Tomaszek took the shot, winner of the arachnids category, on a hot spring evening in Hong Kong, when sudden rainfall prompted thousands of termites to start swarming in the air, providing the perfect opportunity to record the ambush. “The main difficulty in capturing the picture was the thousands of termites flying in my face, attracted by the camera’s flash,” said Tomaszek.

Light filters through the intricate underside of a lamellar mushroom’s cap in Moscow, Russia, in the image above, captured by Valeria Zvereva and winner of the fungi and slime moulds slot in the awards.

In the photo below, decaying lotus leaves sit on dark water, creating a delicate lacework of purple and green studded by bright green clusters of floating fern. Finding the fern among the skeletal leaves “felt like the rebirth of hope and a symbol of the continuation of life”, said photographer Minghui Yuan, who took top prize in the plants category with the image.

Staring straight into the big eyes of this adorable bombycid moth, Laurent Hesemans snapped this photograph, below, in Tinamaste, Costa Rica, winning the invertebrate portrait category with it. “Incredibly photogenic, the large eyes and antenna positions of these moths, especially the males, always lend their portraits a somewhat melancholy feeling,” said Hesemans.