Louie Schwartzberg. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Louie Schwartzberg is fascinated with exposing the world’s wonders through photography.  Three years ago, his talk, “Nature. Beauty. Gratitude,” demonstrated his uncanny ability to capture the captivating beauty of our natural world — the tiniest shake of a flower petal, the stirring complexity of a bee’s wing.

At TED2014, he shows a portion of his newest film, Mysteries of the Unseen World, playing now at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The film uses Schwartzberg’s signature time-lapse photography, as well as high-speed and nanophotography, to capture all that is too small and too slow and too fast for our eyes to capture alone. “I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible,” he says, as he shows the eggs of a butterfly, the wings of a dragonfly, a snail’s tongue, and a caterpillar’s mouth. “[Photography] inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards,” Schwartzberg says. “Who knows what waits to be seen, and what wonders will transform our lives?”