Research Photo Competition: images to inspire

You don’t need to be a photographic whiz to enter our Research Photo Competition. All we ask for is a single image that captures an aspect of your research. Interpret that how you wish!

If you’d like some inspiration, check out similar competitions in the links and images below.

Bournemouth University Research Poster Competition 2017

Bournemouth University have a Facebook page to display the wide variety of submissions to their 2017 research photo competition.

They asked their students and staff: Can you convey the impact of your research through a single image?

Submissions range from playful to thought-provoking to awe-inspiring and include images of bumble bee pollen, a Nepalese birthing centre, santa on a tea break, a bright yellow LGBT bus, prosthetic limb development, an apparent murder scene and one oversized, sleepy cat.

Click on the image to visit the BU Facebook page. You can also vote for your favourite photo while you’re there.

James Macleod EPRSC winner 2017

Announced this week were the winners of the national science photography competition run by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Top prize went to James Macleod of the University of Cambridge for his image of graphene ink in alcohol, a beautiful globular swirl of pewter and charcoal greys. Graphene ink can be used to print electrical circuits onto paper but doesn’t that image also put you in mind of a precious item of art nouveau jewellery or perhaps a strange, new planet with oceans formed of mercury?

Click on the image to read more about the competition and then scroll down to view more winning submissions.

Pina Gruden, Jury Prize, Southampton

The University of Southampton‘s 2016 competition asked its entrants to respond to the question: What does resilience mean to you as a doctoral researcher or those around you?

There are many imaginative responses and inspiring blurbs on the winners’ page.

Commenting on a winning entry featuring a colony of cells, the judges said: ‘There are all those days when nothing seems to work, and you feel you have lost your way. And then, suddenly, one day, “out of the blue” as they say – or out of the black, in this case – there is something there.

We can decide to see beauty in the smallest of things; we can decide to recognise the spectacular in the everyday; we can take heart when the unexpected happens – even on a wet Wednesday afternoon in the lab.

Or we can ignore or miss the seemingly little things that could point us on our way. So many times you thought you would find what you predicted, and you didn’t find it. And then, sometimes something appears which seems to say “here I am; you are not wrong, carry on”.’

Click on the image for more.

Dimitar Epihov, winner, Sheffield

And finally, the University of Sheffield invited students and staff to tell their research story through a single image.

Here, Dimitar Ephihov, winner of the ‘Research in Progress’ category, is shown weighing samples in a tropical jungle.

Click the image to see other winning submissions, including a close-up of a parasitoid wasp taken with a phone camera pressed against the microscope lens! Proof, as we said, that you don’t need to be a photographic whiz to participate.