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

Sometimes beauty is found with a shift in perspective. These wonderful pictures are among the winners of the latest Detail Photographer of the Year contest, an international photography competition dedicated to uncovering the hidden wonders of nature.

Check out the delicate pink branches of the cauliflower soft coral in the main image above, which won the underwater category in the awards. Photographer Ross Gudgeon captured this ethereal image in the blue waters of the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia by placing a small camera inside a spongy structure. “I threaded carefully [lens] across soft coral branches to avoid damaging them and create an image that looks from the inside out,” Gudgeon said in a statement.

This lynx spider above is about to tuck into a handful of unfortunate termites. Artur Tomaszek took the arachnid-winning image on a hot spring evening in Hong Kong, when sudden rainfall caused thousands of termites to swarm mid-air, providing the perfect opportunity to capture the ambush. “The main problem in capturing the image was the thousands of termites flying in my face, attracted by the camera’s flash,” Tomaszek said.

Light filters through the intricate underside of the cap of a lamellar mushroom in Moscow, Russia, pictured above, captured by Valeria Zvereva and winner of the mushroom and slime mold competition.

In the photo below, decomposing lotus leaves lie on dark water, creating a delicate lace of purple and green interspersed with bright green clumps of floating ferns. Finding the fern among the skeletal leaves “felt like a rebirth of hope and a symbol of the continuation of life,” said photographer Minghui Yuan, who won the top prize in the plant category for the image.

Staring directly into the large eyes of this adorable moth, Laurent Hesemans took this photo below in Tinamaste, Costa Rica, winning the Invertebrate Portrait category. “Incredibly photogenic, the large eyes and position of the antennae of these moths, especially the males, always lend a somewhat melancholic feel to their portraits,” Hesemans said.

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