No matter how familiar you may be with Japan, you’ve never seen it like this before. Video production company Armadas has produced an incredible 5.5-minute film that swoops over major cities, giving us a bird’s eye view.

Shot between 2017 and 2019 in places like Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama and Hakodate, the film was released on YouTube on September 1. It’s really cool to see the country from these angles, but there’s one caveat: unless you have a screen with 8K capabilities, you aren’t going to be able to enjoy it at its fullest, taking in the 60 frames per second to catch every sharp detail.

In that way, it’s sort of like opening a gift you won’t be able to fully enjoy for a couple more years – but it’s still worth watching at the best possible quality your devices can handle.

You can find more of Armadas’ work on Vimeo.

How much of the Earth’s beauty – natural and human-created – do we miss every day, because it’s only visible from above? Photographer duo (and brothers) JP and Mike Andrews reveal some of the incredible sights and patterns that become apparent when viewed from the sky, calling their work “abstract aerial art.” Using a pair of drones called the DJI Phantom 4 Pro and DJI Mavic 2 Pro, the brothers find scenes that almost seem too perfect to be real.

It all began in 2016 when the UK-based photographers visited Australia and wondered how much more they could see of remote locations from overhead. They bought their first drone and headed to the outback, amazed by what they found.

“From the perspective of our drone, we saw the textures of the earth for the first time. The swirl of patterns, symmetry and colours. Instantly, we were drawn to the unusual sights we were witnessing from above. Each changing landscape exposed the truly weird and wonderful world we live in. The more we photographed them, the more we couldn’t believe what we were seeing!”

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A post shared by Abstract Aerial Art (@abstractaerialart)

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A post shared by Abstract Aerial Art (@abstractaerialart)

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A post shared by Abstract Aerial Art (@abstractaerialart)

“Pointing the camera on the drone directly downwards towards the earth, was the perspective that intrigued us the most. We referred to it between ourselves as the ‘topdown‘ perspective. It was a view that we had very rarely seen before and it really suited the types of images we were taking. We focused on shooting each landscape we discovered this way. Seeing the world from this angle, led us to compose our shots as if they were artworks rather than traditional photographs.”

Before long, they developed an eye for spotting locations that would reveal the most dazzling effects from that top-down perspective – roads overtaken by wind-blown sand, rainbow striped tulip fields, stacks of crates on barges that create cityscape shadows on the water, orderly parking lots and perfectly spaced beach umbrellas.

You can see more of their work on Instagram @abstractaerialart, and purchase prints on their website.

Once notorious both for its lawlessness and a maze of urban density so intense that sunlight couldn’t penetrate to its lowest levels, Kowloon Walled City was demolished in the 1990s, but a new version of it is rising from the ashes. Standing in stark contrast to the modern towers of Hong Kong just beyond its borders, Kowloon was an autonomous ‘city of anarchy’ built up from the ground like lasagna. 500 buildings were packed into less than seven acres, and there were no municipal services like trash collection or running water.

Outsiders called it the City of Darkness, and it certainly had a squalid appearance, but former residents remember it with fondness as a friendly and tight-knit community where everyone worked together to uphold their own poor but inventive society. But Hong Kong (and later, Britain – check out our previous coverage for the history) wasn’t too fond of the fact that it was run by the mob and packed with gambling dens and brothels, not to mention concerns about its structural soundness. So in 1993, all 50,000 inhabitants were cleared out and the whole thing was razed to the ground.

In its place came a 330,000-square-foot park full of paths and pavilions named after the city’s former streets and buildings. Ponds, gardens and floral walkways took the place of layer after layer of haphazard architecture. That park is still there – but it seems that the wild profusion of growth associated with Kowloon’s spirit couldn’t be contained. It may be modernized, with orderly rows of skyscrapers instead of a labyrinthine network of mismatched towers, but it’s growing more packed every year, and this level of density is creeping into the rest of Hong Kong, too.

Photographer Andy Yeung proves as much with his new drone photography series, Walled City. “The Kowloon Walled City was once the densest place on Earth. Hundreds of houses stacked on top of each other enclosed in the center of the structure. This notorious city was demolished in 1990s. However, if you look hard enough you will notice that the city is not dead.”

“Part of it still exists in many of current high density housing apartments where the only view out of the window is neighbor’s window. I hope this series can get people to think about claustrophobic living in Hong Kong from a new perspective.”

See the whole series at Andy Yeung’s website or on 500px.

In strikingly well-composed, vividly colored scenes resembling abstract paintings, J. Henry Fair’s aerial photographs of toxic waste and industrial activity on Earth give us an uncomfortable look at the cost of human progress. In fact, the images seem unreal: how could the damage caused by industrial pollution be so strangely beautiful? Tar sands, mountaintop removal mining, fertilizer runoff, coal ash, factory farming and devastating oil spills aren’t exactly the stuff that stunning art is usually made of, but Fair is no ordinary artist, forcing us to face the duality of what we’ve created.

Shooting these scenes from the air gives us a perspective we don’t normally have, as if we’re flying over them in person, reckoning with the damage that comes with our consumption of fossil fuels, large-scale farmed meat, chemicals and other commodities that do significant harm to the environment in their sourcing and manufacturing.

Coal combustion waste may not be pretty, but its splashes of rust and bronze against its black and white surroundings are undeniably striking. Some heavy metals, like ‘red mud’ bauxite waste from aluminum production, are almost floral in their contrast to green.  Oil from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill is mesmerizing in its flowing red ribbons against the cobalt blue of the Gulf of Mexico waters. Phospho-gypsum fertilizer waste is a brilliant blue-green, like a gemstone; it contains both uranium and radium, piled dangerously close to drinking water aquifers.

“What interests me about this series is its essential irony and hope,” he says. “The thinking person participating in the modern world understands that all of us are living unsustainably, the impending consequences on our economy are real and significant. But in fact, with a little effort and luck, these limitations could be overcome, ensuring a secure future. And so we must hope, as we are all invested. My goal is to produce beautiful images that stimulate an aesthetic response, and thus dialog. If the pictures are not beautiful, the viewer will not stop to consider them.”

These images and many more are available in the form of a hardcover book set to be released on July 6th, ‘Industrial Scars: The Hidden Costs of Consumption.’

The toll exacted from the earth for human progress is rarely more dramatically visible than from overhead, looking down onto the mines, oil fields, salt flats, recycling yards and other artificial landscapes we’ve created to maintain a population that has exploded since the 1950s. Photographer Edward Burtynsky, who has been flying all over the world capturing aerial images of these scenes since long before the arrival of Google Earth, now sees human activity as expanding “like a rogue species… stretching the boundaries and limits of what we can do in nature.”

How have we changed the shape of the Earth since the dawn of the industrial age? The human population on Earth has expanded by nearly a billion every decade, and in our constant quest for lives of comfort and plenty, we ravenously consume natural resources and radically alter the landscapes we depend on for our own survival. Burtynsky has produced a series of photo collections in 11 categories like water, oil, mines, ship breaking, tailings and quarries to show that our appetites have put our own future in jeopardy.

Accepting his 2005 TED Prize for his stunning work, Burtynsky said he hopes that these images will help persuade millions of people around the world to join a global conversation on sustainability.

“These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”