{"id":279469,"date":"2026-02-07T19:56:19","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T19:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/279469\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T19:56:19","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T19:56:19","slug":"the-wonderful-winners-of-close-up-photographer-of-the-year-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/279469\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wonderful Winners of Close-Up Photographer of the Year 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AThe inside of a cauliflower soft coral in Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. First place in the Underwater category and Close-Up Photographer of the Year. \u00a9 Ross Gudgeon \/ CUPOTY <\/p>\n

Australian photographer Ross Gudgeon has won the grand prize at Close-up Photographer of the Year 7 for Fractal Forest, an extraordinary underwater image photographed inside a cauliflower soft coral in the Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. The image earned Gudgeon the competition\u2019s top award and a \u00a32,500 ($3,400) prize.<\/p>\n

\u201cNamed for its cauliflower-like form, this soft coral is made up of countless small, rounded polyps that give it a puffy texture,\u201d explains Gudgeon. \u201cI wanted to explore a perspective that isn\u2019t possible with conventional lenses, and an underwater probe lens allowed me to do that. By carefully threading the lens through the coral\u2019s branches without disturbing them, I was able to photograph the subject from the inside looking-out, offering a different view of a common marine organism.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"SwarmDanube mayflies (Ephoron virgo) swarm in Szentendre, Hungary. First place in the Insects category. \u00a9 Imre Potyo \/ CUPOTY \"Close-upA moth (Bombycidae sp.) in Tinamaste, Costa Rica. First place in the Invertebrate Portrait category. \u00a9 Laurent Hesemans \/ CUPOTY \"AA tree covered with rime ice in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. First place in the Intimate Landscapes category. \u00a9 Sho Hoshino \/ CUPOTY \"Colorful,Decaying lotus leaves and floating fern (Salvinia natans) in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, China. First place in the Plants category. \u00a9 Minghui Yuan \/ CUPOTY<\/p>\n

Close-up Photographer of the Year (CUPOTY) is an international photography competition dedicated to revealing the hidden wonder of the world through macro, micro and close-up imagery.<\/p>\n

The seventh edition of the competition attracted over 12,000 entries from 63 countries. A jury of 22 expert photographers, naturalists and editors spent more than 20 hours on Zoom calls to select the winners and Top 100 images.<\/p>\n

\"AA Malagasy frog egg clutch hangs on a small trunk next to a pond in Maromizaha rainforest, Madagascar. First place in the Animals category. \u00a9 Filippo Carugati \/ CUPOTY \"Close-upFragment of the lower part of the cap of a lamellar mushroom in Moscow region, Russia. First place in the Fungi category. \u00a9 Valeria Zvereva \/ CUPOTY \"AA Camberwell beauty flashes its wings to defend its feeding spot on a birch tree trunk in Follo, Norway. First place in the Butterflies category. \u00a9 Pal Hermansen \/ CUPOTY \"AA lynx spider feeds on a few termites in Hong Kong. First place in the Arachnids category. \u00a9 Artur Tomaszek \/ CUPOTY \"AbstractA copper plate distressed and oxidised by everyday household materials. First place in the Studio Art category. \u00a9 Paul Kenny \/ CUPOTY
\n \"Close-upStingless bee (likely Tetragonula sp.) nest in Mezhathur, Kerala, India. First place in the Young category. \u00a9 Rithved Girish \/ CUPOTY <\/p>\n

This year\u2019s winning images span 11 categories, with subjects ranging from frog spawn resembling a galaxy and a ghost-like swarm of mayflies approaching a Hungarian town, to an ice-covered tree in Nagano and a fantastical landscape created by oxidising a copper plate with household materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was the toughest competition yet,\u201d says CUPOTY co-founder Tracy Calder. \u201cThe winning image embodies everything close-up photography can achieve \u2014 it shows us a perspective we\u2019ve never seen before and reveals hidden beauty in a familiar subject. The judges were captivated.\u201d<\/p>\n

To check out all the winners, head to the CUPOTY website.<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The inside of a cauliflower soft coral in Lembeh Strait, Indonesia. First place in the Underwater category and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279470,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,70518,71574,438,146,85,46,70520,6602],"class_list":{"0":"post-279469","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-closeupphotographeroftheyear","13":"tag-cupoty","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-macrophotography","19":"tag-nature"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279469\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}