Squirming around in the dirt, a mealworm may seem unremarkable. But if your eyes could magnify the beetle larva by a hundred times, its exquisite face would come into focus. You’d see miniature features that appear so expressive, you might be tempted to anthropomorphize the little rascal.

This is familiar territory for photographer Jannicke Wiik-Nielsen. Her portraits of insects, parasites, bacteria, and other exceptionally small life—part of a collection dubbed Hidden World—showcase these creatures in ways that make them look less like “creepy crawlies,” as she calls them, and more like characters. She achieves the effect through scanning electron microscopy, a technique that yields high-resolution images through the use of electrons instead of photons.

“Electrons have much shorter wavelengths than light waves,”