On belonging, distance, and the unexpected ways we discover ourselves.

There is a particular kind of distance that comes with living in another country. It is not always measured in kilometers, nor does it disappear simply because you have learned your way around a new place. Sometimes, it becomes noticeable in the smallest moments: a conversation that takes an unexpected turn, a joke that needs explaining, or the realization that something you once took for granted is no longer part of your everyday life.

When I moved to Costa Rica, I was looking for a different rhythm. I wanted to step away from the intensity of city life, live closer to nature, and make room for experiences that I felt were missing from my previous life. Leaving Argentina was a conscious decision, and one I am still glad I made. Living in another country has challenged me in ways I could not have anticipated. It has changed how I see the world, how I relate to others, and how I understand myself.

But with time, I have also discovered that choosing to leave one place does not mean leaving behind everything that made it feel like home. And building a life somewhere else is not always as straightforward as imagining it might be.

The things we don’t realize we carry

When we think about missing home, we often think first about family, friends, food, or familiar landscapes. But there are other things that are harder to identify. Culture is woven into everyday interactions: humor, shared references, gestures, ways of expressing affection, and the unspoken codes that shape how people relate to one another.

Even when people speak the same language, the way they communicate and connect can be very different. There are things that don’t need to be explained when you share a cultural background. You recognize a certain kind of humor, understand the context behind a comment, or know how to read the subtleties of an interaction. These small, almost invisible elements create a sense of familiarity that is difficult to reproduce elsewhere.

I have realized that I miss not only particular people, but also the ease of being understood within a familiar cultural context. I miss the natural continuity of relationships, the shared references, and the feeling of being part of a social world that doesn’t require constant translation.

It is not necessarily that one place is better than another. It is that the things that make us feel connected are often deeply rooted in the environments in which we grew up and the experiences we have shared with others.

Starting over without a safety net

Moving abroad often comes with the idea of starting over. There is something liberating about it: the possibility of stepping outside familiar expectations, questioning old patterns, and discovering parts of yourself that may have remained hidden within the life you knew.

But starting over also means leaving behind structures that quietly supported you. Some of them are obvious, like family and friendships. Others are less visible: knowing where to go when you need help, understanding how institutions work, having established professional contacts, or simply knowing that there are people and systems you can turn to when something goes wrong.

I don’t think I fully understood how much these things mattered until I found myself without them.

Building a support network takes time, and it is not something that can be achieved through individual effort alone. It depends on circumstances, opportunities, relationships, and a certain degree of stability. When you are also navigating unfamiliar systems, financial uncertainty, and the practical demands of establishing yourself in another country, even ordinary situations can become more complicated.

There are aspects of everyday life that I once barely noticed because they were simply part of the world I knew. Having a familiar healthcare system, knowing how to access services, or feeling that there are options available if an emergency happens. Living somewhere else has made me more aware of how much security can come from these seemingly ordinary structures.

And when some of those supports are absent or difficult to access, the experience of living abroad can feel more fragile than the freedom of starting over might suggest.

When quiet becomes isolation

One of the things I wanted when I left Argentina was a quieter life. I was tired of the pace of the city and of a working routine that no longer felt meaningful to me. I wanted more space, more time, and a closer relationship with the natural world.

I still value those things. But I have learned that quietness, on its own, is not enough to create a fulfilling life.

I had imagined that living closer to nature would naturally allow me to spend more time exploring, observing, and photographing the extraordinary biodiversity around me. Yet being geographically close to a forest does not necessarily mean having the time, resources, transportation, or freedom to access it regularly. Financial limitations and the practical circumstances of everyday life have often made that more difficult than I expected.

Over time, this has also affected my relationship with photography. When something that has been such an important part of your identity and your way of understanding the world becomes difficult to practice, the distance can grow almost without you noticing. And after a while, reconnecting with it is not always as simple as having the opportunity again.

The same complexity exists in social life. Meaningful connections rarely appear on demand. They grow through repeated encounters, shared experiences, and the gradual development of trust. Finding people with whom to build that kind of connection, and the circumstances in which those relationships can take root, can be one of the more difficult parts of establishing a life somewhere new.

I have come to understand that a quieter environment can offer something valuable while also making other kinds of stimulation and connection harder to find. I had wanted a quieter life, but I hadn’t realized how much I also needed a life that kept opening new doors.

What leaving taught me

Despite the difficulties, I would not describe my experience of moving abroad as a mistake. It has given me a perspective I could not have gained otherwise.

Living outside the environment in which I grew up has made me more aware of the things I carry with me: my habits, expectations, values, and ways of interpreting the world. It has also challenged some of them. When familiar structures disappear, you are often forced to examine what really matters to you and what you may have been taking for granted.

I have learned that independence and self-sufficiency are valuable, but they are not substitutes for connection or support. Being able to navigate unfamiliar situations on your own does not mean that you should have to do everything alone.

I have also learned that personal growth does not automatically make difficult circumstances easier. We can become more resilient, more adaptable, and more aware of ourselves while still feeling the weight of uncertainty, isolation, or practical limitations. One does not cancel out the other.

Perhaps one of the most important things I have discovered is that changing your surroundings does not automatically give you the conditions you need to build the life you imagined. A new place can offer some of the things you were looking for while presenting challenges you could not have anticipated.

The possibility of returning

Every now and then, I find myself thinking about Argentina. Not necessarily about returning to the life I had before, because that is not what I want. The rhythm of that life had become exhausting, and the work I was doing no longer felt right for me. If I ever returned, I would want to build something different, bringing with me what I have learned and the things I now know I need.

But thinking about returning also brings another question: what exactly am I missing?

It is easy to remember the familiar parts of a place when you are far away. Nostalgia has a way of bringing certain details into focus while leaving others in the background. I miss people, conversations, cultural references, and the ease of moving through a world I understand. But I also know that the place I remember has continued to change, just as I have.

The people I miss have their own lives, relationships evolve, and the city I once knew is not necessarily the same city I would encounter today. There is no guarantee that returning would restore the sense of belonging I associate with it.

At the same time, staying does not automatically mean that everything will eventually fall into place. A place can become familiar without necessarily becoming home in the way you once imagined.

Between two homes

Perhaps this is one of the most complicated parts of living abroad: reaching a point where you no longer feel entirely from one place or the other. You carry the language, habits, memories, and cultural references of the place you left, while slowly absorbing new ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

There are moments when I feel comfortable in Costa Rica, and others when I feel completely disconnected. Both experiences are real. I can appreciate the life I have here and still miss what I left behind. I can be grateful for what this journey has taught me without pretending that every part of it has been easy.

For a long time, I thought that belonging was something I could create through a decision: choosing to stay, adapting, and making an effort to become part of a place. I understand it differently now. Belonging is not entirely within our control. It grows through relationships, shared experiences, circumstances, and the feeling that there is a place for us within the world around us.

Maybe home is not a single place we can return to or recreate somewhere else. Maybe it is made of many things: the people who know us, the landscapes that have shaped us, the experiences that changed us, and the small details that make everyday life feel familiar.

I don’t know exactly where I will feel most at home in the future. I only know that leaving was meaningful, that what I miss is real, and that neither of those truths needs to invalidate the other.

For now, I am learning to live with that space between two homes, without forcing myself to turn it into a final answer.

If you ever held a CD under the light and tilted it slowly, you probably remember what happened. The silvery surface suddenly came alive with bands of blue, green, violet, and gold. The colors shifted as you moved your hand, appearing and disappearing with every small change in angle.

For younger generations, a CD might already be an unfamiliar object. But the phenomenon it revealed is still all around us. We see it in soap bubbles, in the iridescent sheen of beetles, and in the wings of certain butterflies. Nature has been producing these shifting colors long before we invented the objects that helped us notice them.

What makes these colors so fascinating is that they don’t always come from pigments. Sometimes, color emerges from the physical structure of a surface and the way it interacts with light.

When Structure Becomes Color

We tend to think of color as something an object possesses. A leaf is green, a flower is red, and a beetle might be metallic blue. Often, these colors come from pigments: substances that absorb certain wavelengths of light and reflect others. Chlorophyll, for example, absorbs light strongly in the red and blue regions of the spectrum, reflecting more green light.

But nature has another way of creating color.

In structural coloration, microscopic structures interact with light through processes such as scattering, diffraction, and interference. Their size, shape, and arrangement influence which wavelengths reach our eyes. The result can be an intense blue, a brilliant green, or a metallic rainbow that shifts with the viewing angle.

The back of a CD offers a familiar demonstration. Its closely spaced tracks diffract white light, separating it into different colors. The mechanism is not identical to that found in every iridescent animal, but the CD gives us an intuitive way to understand how a surface can produce colors without simply being coated in colored pigment.

And once we recognize this possibility, some of the most striking colors in nature become even more intriguing.

A Beetle That Seems to Carry Its Own Light

I’ve always been drawn to the metallic colors of beetles. Some appear deep blue or emerald green; others flash with copper, gold, or violet. Their surfaces can look almost polished, as if someone had carefully coated them with a thin layer of metal.

In many iridescent beetles, microscopic structures in the outer layers of the body reflect light in ways that produce these brilliant hues. Depending on the species, pigments may contribute as well, so the color we see can result from a combination of mechanisms.

These colors are more than a visual curiosity. Structural coloration can play a role in communication, mate recognition, camouflage, and other interactions with the environment, although its function varies among species and is not always fully understood.

Nature doesn’t produce these colors for our admiration. We happen to be able to admire them.

The Hidden Architecture of a Butterfly Wing

Butterfly wings offer another remarkable example. Their colors can seem almost impossibly vivid, particularly when blue or green stands out against a darker background.

In many butterflies, microscopic structures within the wing scales interact with light to produce structural colors. These scales may contain intricate ridges and layers arranged at scales far smaller than we can see with the naked eye. In some species, pigments contribute to the final appearance too, creating colors through a combination of physical structure and chemistry.

A butterfly wing, then, is not simply a surface painted with color. It is a complex arrangement of tiny structures, each contributing to the way light behaves.

And not every blue butterfly gets its color in the same way. Similar appearances can arise from different physical and chemical processes. The color alone doesn’t tell us the whole story.

That’s one of the pleasures of studying nature: the closer we look, the more complicated—and interesting—the explanations become.

The World Is Full of Colors We Already Know

We don’t need to travel to a rainforest or examine an insect under a microscope to encounter these optical phenomena. A soap bubble displays shifting colors through interference in a thin film of liquid. A CD separates white light through diffraction. Reflective road markings and safety materials use other optical principles to make themselves visible under particular lighting conditions.

These examples don’t all work in the same way, but they reveal something we easily overlook: the appearance of an object depends partly on how light interacts with it.

I think about this when I photograph insects. With an iridescent beetle, a small change in the direction of the light or the angle of the camera can transform the colors that appear in the image. What looked dark a moment ago might suddenly flash green or violet.

As photographers, we make decisions about which version of that moment to record. The light, the angle, and the position from which we observe the subject all influence the image we create.

The beetle is the same, but the photograph can tell a very different story.

Seeing Is a Relationship

Structural color challenges a familiar assumption: that the world looks the way it does simply because objects possess the qualities we see.

The microscopic structures responsible for these colors are real, measurable features of an animal’s body. But the colors revealed to us depend on the light and the conditions under which we observe them. What we perceive is the result of an interaction, not just an isolated property of the object.

I think there is something quietly familiar about that.

In everyday life, we often form impressions of people, places, and situations based on what we can see from where we stand. We forget that our perspective is shaped by our experiences, our expectations, and the details we happen to notice. A different point of view may reveal something we had overlooked—not because the thing itself has changed, but because we can finally see another part of it.

The next time you see a beetle flashing green or blue in the light, remember that you may be witnessing the work of microscopic architecture, structures interacting with light on a scale your eyes cannot resolve.

And if you ever find an old CD in a drawer, tilt it toward a window and watch the colors move. For a moment, you’ll be looking at the same fascinating world of optics that helps make beetles shimmer and butterfly wings shine.

One example came from human invention, the others from evolution. Yet all of them remind us that the world is full of phenomena connecting our everyday lives with the extraordinary complexity of nature.

Sometimes, we only need to look a little closer to recognize the connection.

I have always been fascinated by tiger beetles.

They are beautiful little predators, often metallic and brightly colored, with long legs built for running.

But there is something about them that is even more fascinating once you know what they are capable of.

They are incredibly fast.

And not just fast for their size.

Some tiger beetles can run at more than 100 times their own body length per second. The fastest known species can reach around 9 kilometers per hour — which doesn’t sound particularly impressive until you remember that the animal doing it is only a few millimeters long.

For a human, running at the equivalent relative speed would be extraordinary.

For a tiger beetle, it is part of the way it hunts.

These beetles are visual predators. They spot their prey and chase it across relatively open ground, relying on their eyes to guide their movements.

It sounds like a very simple strategy:

See the prey.

Run toward it.

Catch it.

But there is a problem.

The faster the beetle runs, the harder it becomes for it to see.

At high running speeds, the movement of the beetle itself creates enough motion blur to degrade the image of its prey. The visual information becomes less reliable, and eventually the beetle can no longer properly locate what it was chasing.

And this is where tiger beetles become particularly fascinating.

They don’t simply slow down.

They stop.

For a moment, the beetle pauses, locates the prey again, adjusts its direction, and then accelerates.

Run.

Stop.

Look.

Run again.

During a pursuit, this can happen several times before the beetle finally reaches its prey.

At first glance, it seems almost inefficient.

Why would an animal that has evolved such extraordinary speed interrupt that speed every few moments?

But the stop is not a failure of the system.

It is part of the system.

The beetle’s speed gives it the ability to close the distance quickly, while the brief pauses allow its visual system to catch up.

In other words, the beetle has evolved a way to work around the limitations created by its own speed.

And there is another fascinating part of the story.

If the beetle’s vision becomes unreliable while it is running, how does it avoid crashing into things?

This is where its antennae become important.

Researchers found that tiger beetles use their forward-pointing antennae to detect obstacles while running. Even when their eyes were covered, beetles could still respond to obstacles when their antennae touched them. Their antennae essentially provide another way of gathering information about the environment when vision is compromised by speed.

I love this kind of biological solution.

Because it reminds me that adaptations rarely exist in isolation.

A trait evolves because it solves a problem.

But pushing that trait to an extreme can create new problems.

Speed helps the beetle catch its prey.

But speed also makes it harder to see.

So the beetle has another solution: stop briefly, regain visual information, and continue.

And while running, when its eyes cannot provide all the information it needs, its antennae help it negotiate the world directly in front of it.

It is almost as if the animal has built a series of workarounds around its own success.

That is one of the things I find so endlessly fascinating about evolution.

We sometimes talk about adaptations as though an animal simply receives the perfect body for the environment in which it lives.

But evolution is rarely that simple.

It is more like a continuous negotiation.

A change creates an advantage.

That advantage creates new possibilities.

And sometimes those possibilities come with new limitations that have to be solved in another way.

The tiger beetle is a beautiful example of this.

Its incredible speed is not simply a remarkable physical ability.

It has consequences for the way the animal sees, moves, hunts and interacts with its surroundings.

And somehow, all of those systems have to work together.

The next time I see a tiger beetle running across the ground, I will probably think about it differently.

Not just as a beautiful metallic beetle.

Not just as a fast predator.

But as an animal constantly balancing speed and perception — sprinting through a world that can literally become a blur when it moves too quickly.

And perhaps that is one of the most interesting things evolution can teach us:

Sometimes the most extraordinary adaptations come with problems of their own.

And life finds a way to solve those, too.

There is something almost irresistible about a perfectly sharp macro photograph.

Every tiny hair is visible.

Every scale, texture and surface is rendered in incredible detail.

Nothing seems to escape the lens.

And when you discover focus stacking, it can feel like a revelation.

Suddenly, the limitations of macro photography seem to disappear. Instead of choosing which part of the subject will be sharp, you can photograph multiple planes of focus and combine them into a single image.

The result can be extraordinary.

But lately, I have been thinking about something else.

When did sharpness become the goal?

Somewhere along the way, it became very easy to believe that a successful macro photograph is one in which everything is in focus.

The eye is sharp.

The body is sharp.

The legs are sharp.

The hairs are sharp.

Every detail is there for us to inspect.

And technically, it can be an impressive photograph.

But sometimes I look at an image like that and find myself wondering:

What am I supposed to feel?

Because a photograph is not an inventory of details.

It is a composition.

It is light, space, color, shape, movement, atmosphere and intention.

And sometimes, what we choose not to show is just as important as what we show.

This is something macro photography has taught me over the years.

When you photograph a tiny creature, there is an almost endless amount of detail available to you.

A macro lens can reveal a world that the naked eye cannot normally see.

And that is part of the magic.

But seeing more does not necessarily mean saying more.

Sometimes the photograph becomes stronger when only part of the animal is sharp.

A single eye.

The curve of a body.

A pair of legs disappearing into the darkness.

A texture emerging from a soft background.

The rest can dissolve into blur.

And that blur is not a technical failure.

It can be part of the photograph’s language.

Depth of field can tell us where to look.

It can create distance.

It can create intimacy.

It can isolate a subject from its surroundings or make it feel as though it is emerging from them.

It can suggest mystery.

It can leave something to the imagination.

In other words, focus is not only a technical decision. It is a storytelling decision.

I think about this sometimes from the perspective of painting, too.

Even in a landscape photograph where it appears that everything is sharp, not everything is actually in the same plane of focus. The depth of field may be large, but there is still a particular plane where focus is at its sharpest.

As a painter, I learned that if I want something to feel farther away, I don’t necessarily have to draw less detail. I can soften its colors, reduce contrast, make them slightly grayer, and allow the forms to lose some definition.

Our brains use these changes to interpret depth.

So when everything in a photograph is rendered with exactly the same degree of sharpness and definition, something subtle can happen: we lose some of the visual cues that help us understand space.

This is something that sometimes strikes me when I see focus-stacked photographs of insects.

The face can be perfectly sharp from front to back, every tiny detail beautifully resolved, and then suddenly the rest of the body seems to disappear.

There is no gradual transition from sharpness into softness.

It can feel almost as if the body has been cut away from the face.

Everything is either completely resolved within the selected planes or abruptly outside them.

And that transition — that gradual movement from detail into blur — is something I find incredibly valuable.

It gives the photograph depth.

It tells my eye that the subject exists in space, rather than presenting every part of it as if it were occupying the same visual plane.

The same is true of composition.

When I find a tiny animal, my first instinct can be to get closer and show it in all its detail.

But sometimes the more interesting photograph is the one that gives the animal space.

Perhaps the creature occupies only a small part of the frame.

Perhaps the surrounding vegetation becomes part of the story.

Perhaps the darkness is as important as the subject itself.

Perhaps the photograph is not really about showing what the animal looks like.

Perhaps it is about showing what it felt like to find it there.

And this is where I think technique can quietly get in the way of what we are trying to communicate.

Not because technique is bad.

Quite the opposite.

We need technique.

We need to understand light, focus, depth of field, exposure and composition. We need to know what our equipment can do.

But technique is a means.

It is not the reason we make the photograph.

The danger comes when we start making photographs to demonstrate what our technique can achieve instead of using technique to communicate what caught our attention in the first place.

A technically perfect photograph can still say very little.

And an imperfect photograph can sometimes stay with us for years.

Perhaps because we don’t remember photographs for the amount of detail they contain.

We remember them for what they made us feel.

A sense of wonder.

Curiosity.

Tension.

Fragility.

Stillness.

Strangeness.

A feeling of being very close to something we would normally never notice.

This is especially important to me when photographing small creatures.

I don’t want people to look at my photographs and only think, Look at how sharp that insect is.

I want them to stop.

To wonder what they are looking at.

To notice something they might otherwise have walked past.

To feel the strangeness of discovering an entire world hidden at their feet.

Sometimes the best way to make that happen is not to show everything.

It is to choose.

Choose what to reveal.

Choose what to leave soft.

Choose where the eye should rest.

Choose how much space the subject needs.

Choose what belongs in the frame — and what doesn’t.

Because photography doesn’t begin with the question, How much detail can I capture?

It begins with a different question:

What do I want someone to see?

And perhaps even more importantly:

What do I want them to feel?

Sharpness, detail and technical precision will always have their place in photography.

But they are tools.

They should serve the photograph, not become the reason for making it.

Sometimes the detail is the story.

And sometimes the story is everything around it.

There are nights when the forest feels impossibly alive.

You walk along a trail and suddenly there is activity everywhere. Calls coming from the vegetation, movement among the leaves, insects crossing your path, something rustling in the darkness.

You barely have time to look at one thing before something else catches your attention.

And then you come back the following night.

The same trail. The same forest. Almost the same time.

And there is almost nothing.

This has always fascinated me.

What changed?

Sometimes the difference is obvious. A heavy rain may have passed through. The temperature may have dropped. The wind may be stronger.

But sometimes there is no obvious explanation.

I have walked through the forest under a full moon and found incredible activity. Other nights, with almost identical moonlight, the forest has seemed remarkably quiet.

It made me realize how little I actually know about the rhythms that determine when wildlife becomes active.

We tend to think of nature in terms of the cycles we can easily recognize: day and night, wet and dry seasons, the phases of the Moon.

But animals are responding to far more than that.

Temperature, humidity, rainfall, food availability, predators, reproductive cycles, internal biological clocks, and subtle changes in their environment can all influence what happens at a particular moment.

And these factors don’t exist independently.

A change in rainfall can affect insects. Changes in insects can affect the animals that feed on them. The availability of food can change where predators move. A shift in temperature or humidity can alter when a species becomes active.

The forest is not following a single clock.

It is more like an enormous collection of clocks, all moving at different speeds and constantly influencing one another.

We are aware of some of them.

Most of the time, we are oblivious to the rest.

That word has been on my mind lately: oblivious.

Not because we don’t care, and not because we aren’t paying attention.

Simply because so much of what regulates life happens outside our perception.

We arrive at a trail and see what is happening at that particular moment. We might notice that the forest is quiet, but we don’t necessarily know what made it quiet.

We see the outcome without seeing all the signals that came before it.

And perhaps this is why two nights in the same forest can feel like two completely different worlds.

One night, everything seems to be happening at once.

The next, almost nothing seems to be happening.

But the forest has not stopped.

Life has not stopped.

Something has simply shifted in a system much larger than what we can see.

The more time I spend looking for wildlife, the less I think of nature as unpredictable.

Perhaps it is not unpredictable at all.

Perhaps it is following patterns that we haven’t learned how to read yet.

That distinction matters to me.

Because it changes the way I walk through the forest.

Instead of asking only, Where are the animals tonight?, I find myself wondering:

What conditions brought them out?

What changed?

What signal are they responding to?

What happened before I arrived?

And how many of those signals will I never notice?

These questions came to me particularly strongly during my last night walk, when once again I experienced that strange contrast between a forest overflowing with activity and one that, on another night, can seem almost empty.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that these changes are not unique to the darkness.

The forest does this during the day, too.

Activity can shift from one morning to the next, from one hour to another, even when everything looks almost the same to us. Different organisms respond to different combinations of light, temperature, moisture, food, predators, and countless other cues.

The forest is always moving.

We simply catch glimpses of it.

Maybe that is one of the reasons I keep going back.

Every walk gives me a glimpse of a much larger system — one that is constantly moving, responding, and changing, whether I understand it or not.

Sometimes I arrive at exactly the right moment and the forest seems to open itself to me.

Sometimes I walk for hours and find almost nothing.

Both experiences are part of the same story.

The forest keeps moving to rhythms I am only beginning to learn how to hear.

The more I learn about evolution and biology, the more surprised I am by nature.

I know this sounds strange. Evolution is something I have studied for years. As a biologist, I have always known that the incredible diversity of life around us is the result of countless generations of change, shaped by selection, chance, constraints, and an endless interaction between organisms and their environments.

And yet, the more I learn about evolution, physiology, behavior, and the story of life itself, the less ordinary the natural world seems.

Sometimes I am walking through the forest and notice something I have probably walked past hundreds of times before. A tiny insect on a leaf. A spider that looks almost exactly like something else. A strange structure on a plant. A behavior that, at first glance, seems completely unnecessary.

Then I start asking questions.

Why does it look like that?

Why does it behave that way?

What problem is this solving?

How does it actually work?

And suddenly, what looked like a tiny detail becomes the visible result of an incredibly long and complicated story.

That is one of the things I love most about biology: it makes the present feel full of the past.

Every adaptation carries a history.

There is something humbling about realizing that what I am looking at is not simply an animal that “looks” a certain way. Its shape, its colors, its behavior, its senses, its way of finding food or avoiding predators — all of these are connected to generations of organisms facing the particular challenges of being alive.

And sometimes those solutions are wonderfully strange.

Evolution does not design organisms from scratch. It works with what already exists, modifying, repurposing, exaggerating, simplifying. It is full of compromises and historical accidents.

Perhaps that is why the living world is so much stranger than anything we could have designed ourselves.

The more I understand those constraints, and the more I learn about the biology behind them, the more fascinating the results become.

I think photography has something to do with this change in the way I see.

When I first became fascinated with macro photography, I was already drawn to the beauty of small creatures. I wanted to see the details that were invisible to the naked eye — the textures, colors, eyes, hairs, strange shapes.

But understanding biology has slowly changed what I look for.

Now I can look at a tiny creature and wonder not only how beautiful it is, but why it is like that.

And that question can completely change a photograph.

A pattern is no longer just a pattern.

A strange body shape is no longer just something visually interesting.

Camouflage becomes a survival strategy.

Mimicry becomes a conversation between predator and prey.

A bizarre appendage becomes the result of an evolutionary history that I will probably never be able to reconstruct completely.

The photograph captures the organism as it exists now.

Biology reminds me that I am looking at only one moment in a story that has been unfolding for an unimaginably long time.

And perhaps this is why learning more science has never taken the mystery away from nature for me.

Quite the opposite.

The more mechanisms I understand, the more questions appear.

I used to think that understanding something meant getting closer to an answer.

Now I sometimes feel that understanding simply gives me better questions.

I can learn how an animal perceives its surroundings, how a particular adaptation works, how its body carries out some extraordinary physiological process, or why a certain behavior might have evolved — and instead of feeling that the mystery has been solved, I become even more aware of everything I still don’t know.

There are entire worlds happening around us that we barely perceive.

Lives unfolding beneath leaves, inside flowers, under bark, in the soil, in the darkness.

Signals we cannot see.

Scents we cannot detect.

Patterns our eyes are not equipped to recognize.

Behaviors that may make perfect sense to the organism performing them while remaining almost completely invisible to us.

And maybe that is what continues to surprise me most about biology.

Not simply that evolution has produced so many extraordinary forms of life, but that the deeper I look into how life works, the more layers I discover.

The more I learn about the mechanisms behind life, the history that shaped it, and the incredible diversity of ways organisms have found to exist in this world, the more unpredictable and extraordinary it all seems.

The more I understand, the more I realize how little I was seeing.

And perhaps that is why I keep looking.

I’m very happy to see this story in Nature Vision. It came from something I’ve been learning through years of looking for small creatures: finding them is not only about seeing more, but about realizing how much we normally miss.

The glass frog in Witness was a perfect example. As I looked at it through my macro lens, its body seemed to disappear into the leaf, and I found myself wondering where the frog ended and the forest began.

I hope the images in this issue make you slow down for a moment, look a little closer, and become curious about the small lives hiding in plain sight.

npn.link/issue-13

 

A photograph can show us a moment.

It can show us a creature, a gesture, a landscape, a particular arrangement of light and color. It can freeze something that existed for only a fraction of a second and make it available to someone who was not there.

But every photograph also leaves something out.

No matter how carefully we compose an image, there will always be a world beyond its edges.

A photograph cannot show the hours spent looking for the subject.

It cannot show the rain, the mud, the mosquitoes, the sounds of the forest, or the feeling of standing in darkness with nothing but a small beam of light revealing fragments of the world.

It cannot show what happened five minutes before the shutter was pressed, or what happened five minutes after.

And it cannot fully show what was happening inside the photographer at that moment.

Perhaps this is one of the most fascinating things about photography.

We often think of a photograph as a representation of what was there.

But photography doesn’t have to reproduce reality literally.

It can document it, interpret it, transform it, or move far beyond it. Through intentional camera movement, multiple exposures, deliberate blur, unusual perspectives, or the deliberate manipulation of light, something that existed in front of the camera can become an entirely different visual experience.

Photography gives us that freedom.

The subject can remain real while the photograph becomes abstract.

And even when the intention is to create a faithful representation of the natural world, the photograph is still shaped by the person behind the camera: by what they notice, what they choose to emphasize, what they leave outside the frame, and what they want the viewer to feel.

Two photographers can stand in exactly the same place, looking at exactly the same subject, and come away with completely different photographs.

One may emphasize its environment.

Another may isolate a detail.

One may use soft, natural light.

Another may build a dramatic image with artificial light.

One may want to show the animal as part of the forest.

Another may want us to forget the forest entirely and see the creature as an almost abstract form.

The subject hasn’t changed.

The experience of seeing it has.

And that is where photography becomes more than documentation.

It becomes expression.

Even when I photograph a small creature for the purpose of showing something about its natural history, I am making choices. I decide where to stand, what to include in the frame, what to leave outside it, how much depth of field to use, how to shape the light, and which moment to preserve.

Those decisions are part of the story.

They tell us something about the subject, but they also tell us something about the person behind the camera.

This becomes particularly evident when photographing small creatures.

A macro photograph can make an insect look monumental. It can reveal structures invisible to the naked eye, transform a leaf into a landscape, or bring us close enough to a frog that we can see the texture of its skin.

But the image is still only a fragment.

The animal has a life beyond the photograph.

It was moving before I found it. It was responding to its surroundings. It may have been feeding, avoiding a predator, searching for a mate, communicating, or simply resting.

There is a whole story taking place outside the frame.

And sometimes, what happens outside the frame is precisely what makes the photograph meaningful to me.

This is one of the reasons I enjoy telling the stories behind my photographs.

The image tells one part of the story.

The words can tell another.

They can give context to what the photograph cannot show. They can tell us what happened before the shutter was pressed, what I noticed, what surprised me, what I felt, or what I understood only after the encounter was over.

But even words cannot reconstruct the entire experience.

There will always be something missing.

And perhaps that is not a limitation we need to overcome.

Perhaps it is part of what makes photography so powerful.

A photograph is a fragment of reality, but it can also be a fragment of perception, memory, emotion, and intention.

It doesn’t have to reproduce everything that was there.

It can choose what matters.

It can make us feel something that the photographer felt, even if we never experience the original moment ourselves.

And maybe this is why I keep photographing.

Not simply to preserve what I saw, but to offer someone else a way into it.

A doorway.

A glimpse.

An invitation to look.

What lies beyond the edges of the photograph will always remain partly invisible.

But perhaps the best photographs don’t try to show us everything.

They make us want to see more.

There is a moment that always feels the same.

It doesn’t matter how long it has been since I last picked up my camera or how distracted life has made me feel.

The moment I truly see a small creature, something shifts.

The world becomes smaller.

And somehow, at the same time, infinitely larger.

A few days ago, I went to keep a friend company while she worked on her property. I brought my camera with me, hoping I might find a few small creatures along the way, but with no particular expectations. As she worked, I wandered slowly through the forest, stopping whenever something caught my eye.

The first thing I found was a lynx spider.

The simple act of discovering it filled me with the familiar excitement I have felt for as long as I can remember. Even after all these years, finding a small creature hidden in the forest has never become ordinary.

Then I raised my camera.

Looking through my macro lens, I was no longer simply observing a spider.

I found myself face to face with it.

Its tiny eyes.

Its expression.

Its presence.

The photograph was no longer just a record of an animal.

It had become a moment of connection.

Something inside me quietly woke up.

We continued walking until my friend suddenly stopped.

“Look… a frog.”

Perched quietly on a pale brown branch was a masked tree frog wearing its daytime colors. Instead of the bright green many people associate with tree frogs, it had turned soft cream and brown, blending beautifully with the branch beneath it. It wasn’t trying to impress anyone. It was simply doing what millions of years of evolution had prepared it to do.

The moment I saw it, everything else disappeared.

Time.

Thoughts.

The outside world.

I began photographing it from every angle I could imagine, completely absorbed in the experience. Then my camera warned me that the battery was almost empty.

I actually had to run back to my backpack, replace the battery as quickly as I could, and hurry back.

I wasn’t ready to leave.

The truth is…

I never am.

Every frog feels like an old friend I have the privilege of meeting again.

Every angle reveals a different personality.

Every photograph is another attempt to show the world what I see.

Because that is what I have slowly realized after years of photographing small creatures.

I am not simply documenting wildlife.

I am trying to help other people love these small lives the way I do.

Every photograph asks the same quiet question:

Can you see what I see?

Can you see that this tiny frog is not just another amphibian resting on a branch?

Can you see its patience…

its elegance…

the millions of years of evolution written into its colors, its eyes, and its remarkable ability to disappear into the forest?

Can you feel, even for a moment, the affection I feel every time I kneel beside one?

Perhaps that is why photography has never been only about photography for me.

It has always been an act of translation.

A way of transforming wonder into something visible.

Of helping others discover beauty where they might have expected indifference…

or even fear.

Perhaps that has always been my real work.