Macro photography can help us see the world in a new way. By making small subjects look larger, we can see the beauty in details that are often undetectable to the naked eye.
This post shares some of today’s most famous, and some more obscure professional macro photographers working in this niche.
The Best and Most Influential Macro Photographers
These jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring macro photos will give you plenty of inspiration and tips for your own macro photography.
1. Ole Bielfeldt
Cologne-based macro photographer Ole Bielfeldt of Macrofying is known for his deep zooms into everyday objects. Each eye-opening image reveals the microscopic details of the world around us, providing a new perspective on our hidden universe. In his latest series, Bielfeldt turns his lens to beach sand from Mallorca. Bielfeldt is a famous macro photographer and produces some stunning macro photographs.
With the aid of a microscope, he uncovers an array of colorful fragments. The stunning macro images lay out the individual elements that comprise the sand, revealing both the natural beauty of coral debris and shells as well as the prevalence of tiny pollutants like microplastics.
2. Andrey Savin
Andrey Savin is an underwater macro photographer who specializes in capturing the amazing beauty and subtle details of the underwater world. Since 2018, Andrey has been permanently residing in the province of Negros Oriental in the Philippines.
After graduating from Moscow State University in 1993, Andrey devoted more than 20 years to the management and development of the company he founded, and then decided to completely change his life and ended his business career, becoming a professional underwater macro photographer. Winner and finalist of many prestigious international competitions, Andrey spends much of his time traveling the world, exploring different underwater environments and capturing their unique beauty with his unique techniques. Its goal is to show the hidden beauty of the underwater macro world and encourage people to respect and protect the world around them.
3. Levon Biss
Levon Biss is regarded as one of the leading macro photographers of his generation whose work concentrates on natural history and science. His most recent macro photography series, Extinct and Endangered, features rare insects from the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
His photographic process involves photographing each specimen in multiple sections, with each section lit differently, to accentuate the different features of the insect. The final product is a stunning and meticulously detailed composite of over 10,000 images, producing exhibition prints up to 3m in length, revealing the microscopic detail of the insects.
4. Adam Gor
At age six, Hungarian Adam Gor was already taking photos with his Nikon compact camera. As the years went by, he got more serious and, in 2009, started a Flickr gallery featuring high-quality macro photos of mostly butterflies and moths.
Today, he’s taken over 2000 images, and although his main subject is butterflies, he also takes photos of other insects, reptiles, amphibians and captures flowers. He currently works and learns as a biologist, so this connects his interest in photography and butterflies.
5. Javier Rupérez
Award-winning photographer Javier Rupérez specializes in capturing the extraordinary beauty of insects through extreme macro photography. Rupérez is widely regarded as one of the world’s best extreme macro insect photographers.
He’s been featured in publications such as The Sun (UK), The Guardian (UK), Stern (Germany), and more. He continues to search the world for new and interesting specimens to photograph. If you want to see Javier’s seriousness, you can view the equipment page on his website.
6. Christian Brockes
Christian Brockes is a German wildlife macro photographer behind the fascinating website Wild Macro. He is a professional photographer best known for his work documenting insect species and jumping spiders in particular, with an attention to their alien-like features, textures, and postures.
He not only takes stunning life size shots profiling the intricacies of each of his tiny subjects to create awareness for the ‘tiny world’, but can respect nature and works to an ethical framework in which he doesn’t harm or disturb them in the process.
7. Alexey Kljatov
Alexey Kljatov is a famous macro snowflake photographer that employs a low-cost variation of a lens reverse technique using a compact Canon Powershot A650is. His unique methods involve capturing every snowflake as a series of identical photos and then averaging them together.
He has had his work published by NASA, the Daily Mail, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News. He’s got an amazing Flickr gallery that showcases over 140 unique snowflakes he’s taken over the years, and his best shots are compiled into a YouTube video you can watch here. Additionally Alexey gives out freebies in the form of captivatingly intricate phone wallpapers.
8. Timothy Boomer
Timothy Boomer is a California-based natural history photographer with a special interest in smaller flora and fauna. His favorite subjects are wildflowers, mushrooms, and plant galls. Tim’s publications include the California Academy of Sciences, UC Press, Hallmark, ThinkGeek, Random House, Colossal, and websites worldwide.
Boomer’s macro photography has also been used in research by scientists studying the behavior of insects and other small creatures. You can view Timothy’s work in his Natural History Image Library.
9. James Weiss
James Weiss is a photographer with a passion for the microscopic world. His YouTube channel, Journey to the Microcosmos, features videos of him exploring the unseen world around us through a microscope.
In his videos, James takes viewers on a tour of the fascinating and often bizarre and tiny creatures, microscopic organisms, that live in our homes, gardens, and bodies. He also shares his own original microphotography and creative photographs, giving viewers a close-up look at these little creatures, the seemingly unlimited diversity, and the hidden beauty of the natural world.
10. Steve Axford
Steve Axford is a professional macro photographer who captures the beauty and intricacies of fungi. An ambassador for Sony Australia, he’s won the Sony World Photography Awards, and his images offer a rare glimpse into the hidden world of these often overlooked organisms, revealing their delicate structures and vibrant colors.
Axford’s photographs have been featured in numerous publications, including Nat Geo Magazine. He also has unique expertise in time-lapse photography, some of which were featured in BBC Planet Earth. His unique photography makes him one of the more famous macro photographers.
11. Linden Gledhill
Linden Gledhill is a British artist and scientist who creates beautiful imagery by exploring different image scales and fragments of time within the physical world. He uses his background in science to operate advanced microscopes to capture unexpected images revealing the hidden beauty in everyday objects and scenes.
A passion for photography has led Linden to collaborate with other artists and designers on promotional artwork and effective advertisement campaigns. His images can be found in books, record sleeves, promotional videos, and apparel for corporate clients, including ExxonMobil, GMC, Canon, and British Telecom.
12. Alison Pollack
Alison Pollack is a California-based macro slime mold photographer who specializes in capturing the beauty of these tiny organisms. Using a microscope objective on her camera, she can magnify individual fruiting bodies just a millimeter tall and smaller than a pinhead.
Her unique style of macro photography highlights even the smallest features, like individual spores, the veiny web structure encasing them, and the distinct texture and color of each organism. Alison’s work is featured in numerous publications, like My Modern Met and the New York Times. She is currently working on a book about slime molds.
13. Alberto Ghizzi Panizza
Famous Italian photographer Alberto Ghizzi Panizza is a Nikon Europa testimonial, Nikon School Master and ESO Photo Ambassador. He was born in Parma in 1975 and from a young age inherited the artistic vein from his grandfather.
He began to use digital photography in 1998 with a 0.06 megapixel camera believing in the enormous potential of this technology. He has received more than forty national and international awards and constantly carries out workshops, courses, exhibitions, and conferences all over the world. You can view Panizza’s work on his website.
14. Diego Mendez
Diego Mendez is a macro nature photographer from Argentina and winner of the Close-up Photographer of the Year Award. With a motto of “all good things are wild and free,” he promotes cruelty-free and ethical photography.
His famous macro photography involves exploring the world of insects and spiders, and he doesn’t use any baits to attract insects. As an arthropod conservationist photographer, he has captured thousands of macro photos, all in a natural setting.
15. Oliver Dum
Oliver Dum is an extreme macro photographer based in Germany. His work uses different photography techniques and focuses on the close-up details of nature, often using a microscope to magnify his subjects to produce amazing images.
His photography goes beyond the typical 1:1 macro shots and gets extremely close to the point where you can see pollen grains on insect eyes and scales. Dum’s photography has been featured in numerous publications, which can be viewed on his website.
16. Thomas Shahan
Thomas Shahan is a macro photographer and artist specializing in close-up images of insects, especially spiders. As one person commented on his YouTube, “you know you are a master photographer when you can see the individual hairs of a jumping spider reflected in its eyes.”
Thomas joins this list as one of the most talented photographers. His beautiful photos explore a whole world of tiny things. His close-ups of spiders’ eyes have shined a new light on these creatures, making them appear less threatening and something many photographers can appreciate.
17. Helene Schmitz
Swedish artist Helene Schmitz focuses on the fascinating structural details of plants in her macro photographs. Schmitz captures the intricate beauty of plants usually unseen by the naked eye.
Schmitz’s second series, Linnaeus Project, drew from Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus’ work in creating order and categorization in the natural world and the theme of the modern exploitation of natural resources.
18. Chris Perani
Amongst his striking portfolio of minerals, plants, and animals, one of Chris Perani’s prominent series reveals microscopic details of butterfly wings. The series showcases abstract views of striking patterns and brilliant colors.
Perani achieves extreme close ups by using a 10x microscope objective with a 200mm lens, which creates an almost non-existent depth of field. His post-processing results in 2,100 separate exposures, all combined into a single image. Each shot is repeated 6 times for various parts of the butterfly wing.
19. Fernan Federici
Fernan Federici is not only a macro photographer but a molecular geneticist and award-winning microscopist. His deep understanding of microbial plant systems and his technical expertise aid his Photomicrography and documenting plants, bacteria, and crystals.
Particularly special is Federici’s use of Fluorescence microscopy, a type of microscope that uses light to excite atoms in a specimen, causing them to emit radiation that is then captured by the microscope. This allows for the observation of fluorescent areas on a dark background with high contrast, creating images that contain a striking visuality and a lot of scientific information.
20. Jamie Price
Jamie Price is a macro photographer based in Leicestershire. He also does portrait, pet portrait, and product photography. He frequently photographs in his home and has a knack for making even the scariest spiders look astonishingly beautiful.
In addition to living creatures, you can also find small objects, fruits, flowers, or seeds among his macro images. You can view Jamie’s macro portfolio on his website.
21. Nicky Bay
Nicky Bay is a macro and micro fauna photographer based in Singapore. He produces great macro photos that have been featured in National Geographic, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Nature TTL, and many other publications. Nicky shoots close-up images of insects and other small creatures that have earned him international acclaim.
Nicky’s meticulous attention to detail ensures that his photographs are a stunning work of art. You can view his work here. Nicky also sells books, photography gear, and more at his shop: Macro Dojo.
22. Erwan Frotin
Erwan Frotin has been engaged in the photographic exploration of plant, mineral, and animal forms for nearly twenty years. His macro photography is characterized by sophisticated compositions and a mastery of digital tools. In 2010 Frotin began focusing his research on the formal diversity of nature, an endeavor that has resulted in a poetic encyclopedia of primitive, animal, and vegetal forms.
By immortalizing plants through meticulous portraiture, Frotin pays homage to the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt and the New Objectivity photography movement. At the same time, his palette of shimmering colors and careful compositions creates a style that is very much his own.
23. Vyacheslav Mishchenko
Vyacheslav Mishchenko is a Ukrainian nature photographer who takes pictures of small creatures in their natural habitats. He uses a digital camera to capture images of snails, insects, and other animals.
Mishchenko has gained popularity, specifically with his snail shots. When asked why he likes snails, he says they’re just extraordinary creatures. They’re magic. He spends a lot of time photographing them in their natural habit and tries to capture their natural behavior using the FUJIFILM FinePix S200EXR and the NIKON D7000, with the AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8G Lens.
24. Oscar Rojas
Oscar Rojas is an Olympus macro photographer from Florida that’s a nature lover. Rojas takes all kinds of macro photos using an AK diffuser. His closeups of insects, spiders, and sometimes caterpillars are amazingly sharp.
He also captures their behaviors, like when spiders are eating other tiny things. In his captions, he describes what we can see and adds the technical details of the process he used to photograph it.
25. Karla Thompson
Karla Thompson is a macro arthropod conservationist photographer. She believes in ethical photography and doesn’t manipulate any subject for photo ops.
A self-proclaimed Nikon fangirl, Thompson loves nature and wants to share that love with others through her photographs which can be viewed on her website, MacroCosmos. She hopes that her pictures will help people see the beauty in nature and appreciate it more.
26. Yudy Sauw
Yudy Sauw’s hyperreal otherworldly close-ups of insects have gained him a lot of well-deserved recognition with recent features in both Wired and The Guardian. Sauw photographed the bugs at his home studio in Banten, Indonesia, using a Nikon D7000 camera, a Nikon 105mm AF f/2.8D lens, and a Raynox super macro conversion lens for his razor-sharp detailing.
Though most of his subjects are common house flies and yellow jackets, his excellent use of lighting (from a Nikon R1C1 wireless close-up speedlight system) combined with carefully chosen solid tonal backgrounds gives the shots a dramatic and alien aesthetic.
27. Isaac Wishart
Isaac Wishart is a macro reptile and lizard photographer based in Gold Coast, Australia. He uses a Nikon D850 camera and a Laowa 100mm macro lens when capturing photographs.
His work has been featured in National Geographic Australia, BBC Wildlife Magazine, and Nature Photography Magazine. He specializes in close-up macro photography of reptiles and amphibians in their natural habitats, and his work highlights the beauty and diversity of these often overlooked animals.
Conclusion: Top Macro Photographers
We hope you enjoyed our roundup of the best macro photographers to follow today! A few other famous macro photographers worth mentioning are: Danny Perez, Jacky Parker, Shikhei Goh, and Carlo Galliani.
If you’re interested in learning about other top photographers in different genres, be sure to check out our series of articles on famous photographers. Most importantly, to find your signature style in the world of macro photography, have fun taking macro photographs and exploring the little things in life! Who knows, you may find yourself on a list of the world’s top macro photographers!
