We want to manipulate light for several applications: microscopy, data storage, leds, lasers, modulators, sensor and solarcells to make our life healthier, easier or more comfortable. However, especially in small scales manipulating light have many difficulties. We could not focus or localize light into subwavelength dimensions easily, which is the key solution to beat today’s devices both in performance and cost. Achievements in three key research fields may provide the answer to these problems. These emerging research fields are metamaterials, photonic crystals and surface plasmons. In this thesis, we investigated beaming and localization of electromagnetic waves in periodic structures such as: subwavelength metallic gratings, photonic crystals and metamaterials. We studied off-axis beaming from both a metallic subwavelength aperture and photonic crystal waveguide at microwave regime. The output surfaces are designed asymmetrically to change the beaming angle. Furthermore, we studied frequency dependent beam steering with a photonic crystal with a surface defect layer made of dimmers. The dispersion diagram reveals that the dimer-layer supports a surface mode with negative slope. Thus, a photonic crystal based surface wave structure that acts as a frequency dependent leaky wave antenna was presented. Additionally, we investigated metamaterial based cavity systems. Since the unit cells of metamaterials are much smaller than the operation wavelength, we observed subwavelength localization within these metamaterial cavity structures. Moreover, we introduced coupled-cavity structures and presented the transmission spectrum of metamaterial based coupled-cavity structures. Finally, we demonstrated an ultrafast bioassay preparation method that overcomes the today’s bioassay limitations using a combination of low power microwave heating and split ring resonator structures.