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Paul uses one of the most powerful microscopes in the world at the Smith & Nephew research centre in Heslington near York and he produces detailed images for the medical technology business.

He spends most of his day looking at things such as artificial joints and wound dressings using one of the most powerful microscopes in the world. Paul explains why...

The Scanning Electron Microscope.

"The reason we have to look so closely at wound dressings or implants is to look at the interaction between the body's own tissues and those wound dressings, artificial joints or implants to see how the body copes with having that in place. The emphasis is to get people to recover as quickly as possible with the minimum of fuss and pain."

"The microscope itself is quite specialised, it鈥檚 a scanning electron microscope and with that we can take our magnification from say x50 to up to x1 million! So it really is a powerful instrument."

Being magnified up to one million times bigger means that fairly mundane objects can take on a bizarre beauty.

Paul with his microscope!

"It鈥檚 a fascinating job and can be tremendously good fun, images of things like titanium crystals at very high magnification are visually spectacular and it鈥檚 quite common that you鈥檒l stumble across that amazing fantasy imagery.听They have such visual impact it鈥檚 tempting to take them just for the joy of it really and the artistic side.

"They come off the microscope as black and white images, there is no colour produced by an electron microscope, but it鈥檚 quite easy nowadays to use a piece of photo editing software to false colour them to give them that bit more impact. Often people false colour for听scientific reasons as well, they might want to pick out particular features.

Detail from Paul's winning image!

"I personally find it tremendously enjoyable to do it, so every now and then I鈥檒l see something spectacular and think I鈥檒l have a go at false colouring that."

A selection of Paul's images were entered for the art prize in the prestigious Visions of Science and Technology Awards 2007, and 'Micro-Cosmos' was short-listed. Paul attended a glittering award ceremony in September and his image won!

Congratulations Paul... Enjoy the champagne!