Night nominee

During a new moon in one of the darkest parts of Texas, I set up a custom four-camera rig designed to capture the Geminid meteor shower. The system worked even better than expected. After examining the final image, not only did I find the meteors I had been searching for, but also captured parts of five other meteor showers happening that night: the Puppid Velids, Monocerotids, Sigma Hydrids, Comae Berenicids, and Leonis Minorids.

Nathan Myhrvold is photographer, chef, scientist, and author. As the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, Myhrvold embraces the power of technology to push photographic limits. He and his team build custom cameras, robotics, and software to capture the world in new ways.

Myhrvold’s photography has been featured in publications including Smithsonian Magazine, Digital Photo Pro, Popular Photography, Galerie, and Bloomberg Pursuits. He is the founder of Modernist Cuisine, author of The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and coauthor of Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Modernist Cuisine at Home, Modernist Bread, and Modernist Pizza.

He pioneered food photography techniques to take the avant garde photographs in his award-winning cookbooks, which garnered worldwide recognition and led to the opening of Modernist Cuisine Gallery, the first gallery in the world devoted to food photography.

When not photographing food, Myhrvold travels the globe to visually document nature and wildlife. His recent innovations in snowflake photography have resulted in the highest resolution snowflake camera in the world. An avid researcher and lover of space, Myhrvold did postdoctoral cosmology work with Stephen Hawking and is currently developing new astrophotography techniques.