Barry Webb wins British Wildlife Awards with tiny slime mold macro

Barry Webb won the Botanical Britain category at the British Wildlife Photography Awards 2026 with a photograph of a tiny slime mold that measured only about one millimetre tall, and the image earned its impact the hard way. At that scale, depth of field collapses almost immediately, so Webb shot 87 separate frames at different focus points and merged them into one finished frame.

That is the real story behind the picture: not just a rare subject, but the discipline required to make it legible. Focus stacking was doing the heavy lifting here, turning an almost invisible organism into something that reads as crisp, layered, and strangely cinematic. The subject may have been tiny, but the process was anything but casual.

Webb shot the image on an OM System OM-1 with the M.Zuiko 90mm f/3.5 Macro and a 2x teleconverter, a combination that shows how specialized serious macro work has become. The lens and teleconverter pairing gave him the reach needed to work at extreme close range, while the body’s standout spec sheet added a practical edge. The OM-1 is billed as the world’s only IP53 weather-sealed camera and the first camera with Cross Quad Pixel AF.

That weather sealing is not what made the frame sharp. The stacking did that. But it does matter to anyone shopping for macro gear, because this kind of work often happens outside, low to the ground, and in conditions where a camera body has to cope with more than just a studio table. The OM-1’s sealing does not replace technique, but it does make a specialized macro setup more usable when the subject is in the wild rather than under controlled light.

Webb’s win also fits the profile of a photographer who already knows the rhythm of close-up competition work. Macro is unforgiving at the best of times, and microscopic subjects punish sloppy focus choices faster than almost any other genre. Webb’s 87-frame stack is a reminder that the best macro images are usually built, not grabbed, and that the difference between a nice record shot and an award winner often comes down to patience at the edge of visibility.