Most people, upon seeing an insect in the house, will squish it beneath a shoe, toss it in the trash or quickly sweep it out the door. Not Daniel Kariko. He gathers up whatever comes his way—be it an ant, a boll weevil, a tree cricket, whatever—and photographs it under microscopes. The stunning close-ups offer a fascinating glimpse at creatures too often deemed pests.

His ongoing project, Suburban Symbiosis: Insectum domesticus, started in 2011 when the biology department at East Carolina University, where Kariko teaches photography, invited folks from other departments to use its lab. It took Kariko awhile to develop his approach, but he landed on a style in which he shoots the insects—all of which are dead—under a stereoscopic microscope and a scanning electron microscope. Then he combines the images in Photoshop.

The stereoscopic microscope captures the bug’s color. Miniature LEDs illuminate the specimen, and he tweaks the look with two or three small reflectors and diffusers Kariko made by cutting up studio equipment. The microscope has a shallow depth of field, so he typically combines six shots with various focal lengths to create a final image.

After shooting with the stereoscopic microscope, Kariko moves on to the scanning electron microscope, which he uses to create a black and white image packed with detail and resolution. This image must correspond with the stereoscopic microscope image in terms of focal length, angle, and the like, so Kariko places that image on his laptop for comparison while shooting. Once everything is aligned, he takes another half dozen photos at different focal lengths.

This can take hours, but even then, Kariko is far from finished. He'll spend hours using Photoshop to carefully blend the images into a final print. So far, he has shot more than 50 bugs, but hasn't finished all the images. “For one image it probably take me takes between 15 and 20 hours,” he says.

You’d think the strangest bugs would make the most compelling images, but Kariko says sometimes the opposite is true. Among his favorite pictures is the boll weevil—a common pest that looks a lot like something you'd see in Star Wars. “They become interesting when you see an aspect of them that the naked eye can’t capture,” he says.

For Kariko the project is mostly visual. He loves providing a new perspective on these insects and has drawn inspiration for lighting and angle from 17th century Dutch painters like Johannes Vermeer and Jan van Eyck. He’s keen to collaborate further with scientists, as he's been inspired by the lab and hopes his approach to photographing the creatures might help scientists see them in new ways.

“There is a lot of back and forth and I know that we can learn a lot from working in each other’s fields,” he says.