plankton

Photographer and filmmaker Jan van IJken's photo series and film peers into the unseen world of one of the most important lifeforms on Earth: plankton.

Japanese photographer Ryo Minemizu sometimes spends up to 8 hours underwater in a single day, keeping his body as motionless as possible while pointing his camera and lens at tiny marine organisms. His photos of glowing sea life are part of a new exhibition titled Jewels in the Night Sea.

There are certain kinds of plankton that glow when they're disturbed by movement. Photographer Kris Williams recently went out to a shore in Wales and captured a set of photos and videos showing the beauty of this bioluminescent plankton.

Photographer Eric Paré has built much of his career around the concept of light painting, but a recent photo shoot he did involved a very different source of lighting: the bioluminescence of glowing plankton.

When you look at the photographs in her series Into the Umbra, photographer Julia Bennett wants you to think you're looking at outer space. And then, just as your mind is struggling to expand to encompass the far reaches of the solar system where the image was captured, that's when she wants you to realize that you're looking at something you could find in any old liter of Sea Water.

Her images weren't captured with a telescope peering into the heavens, but a microscope that peers into the micro worlds inside droplets of seawater.