Dragonfly's iridescent wings shimmering in the light on the background of a serene lake with clouds mirrored on its surface, creating an almost dreamlike atmosphere.

These incredible photos show you life from a bug’s perspective

Revealing the weird and wonderful world that lies just below your feet.

From some angles, the wings of the butterfly dragonfly look golden or translucent. To reveal the full spectrum of colors, Takuya Ishiguro waited with a strobe on the shores of Kejonuma, a lake in Miyagi, Japan, until the insect fluttered by and its wings reflected his light and the sun perfectly.
Photographs byTakuya Ishiguro
Text byNick Martin
October 6, 2025
Exposure is a National Geographic series that features photography from around the world that our editors love. See more.

The realm of insects is right in front of our eyes, filled with kaleidoscopic characters flaunting vibrant colors and dramatic action. But it’s so minuscule, it’s easy to miss. That’s why several years ago, photographer Takuya Ishiguro began altering his camera, adding a magnifying lens between the sensor and main lens. Such modifications are tricky to pull off, because mispositioning any of the components will ruin the image quality. But once he perfected the setup, he was able to capture the tiny but glorious lives of the insects around the lakes and fields of his home in Osaki, Japan. The new perspective left him with “a deep respect for nature’s inventiveness.”

Ishiguro found that the invertebrates displayed a remarkable sense of creativity as they harvested food, mated, and burrowed to build their homes. He came to see insects not as specimens but as “beings that live together with us.” (See the extraordinary lives of ordinary bugs.)

A wasp is sucking nectar on the background features utility poles and buildings.
While digger wasps do hunt grasshoppers and cicadas to feed their young, they feed primarily on flower nectar. In urban areas like Nikaho, Japan, that often comes from the Cayratia japonica vine.
The brown moth looking like a bird is sucking nectar.
During an early morning shoot in afield outside Osaki, this hummingbird hawk moth flew by on the hunt for nectar.
Dragonfly resting, adorned with countless droplets of morning dew.
A dragonfly covered in morning dew takes a moment to rest. It took Ishiguro five separate visits to the field for all the conditions to align to capture this image.
An ant is carrying shrimp to its nest.
On the streets and paths around his home, Ishiguro often saw ants carrying butterfly and moth larvae back to their nests. But wood ants are opportunistic feeders, just as happy to add a tiny crustacean to the menu.
The leaf-cutter bee cutting off a leaf.
The leaf-cutter bee lives up to its name, using its sharp jaws to carve off neat pieces of leaves to build its nest. Ishiguro calls these insects “little engineers in nature.”
Spider wasps paralyze their eight-legged prey, then fly them to a spot where they can dig a burrow to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Covered in morning dew, a housefly takes a moment to rest under the first light of dawn.
A praying mantis will wait in stillness near a flower until its prey comes buzzing or skittering along; then it snaps into action, as it did with this unsuspecting fly.
Wasps are methodical creatures—to build their nests, they create small balls of mud and ferry them back and forth to their eventual nesting spots, repeating the process until the structure is complete.
Mantis are preying on lizards larger than themselves on the streets
The Japanese giant mantis grows to no more than three and a half inches long but will eat nearly anything it can catch. Using its powerful forelegs, the mantis strikes quickly to capture its prey—here, a lizard—and begins eating immediately.
A version of this story appears in the November 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine.

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