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)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Abstract Aerial Art (@abstractaerialart)

View this post on Instagram

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.

Human civilization has grown and expanded at an amazing rate – or alarming, depending on who you ask – and you can watch the last 32 years of it unfold via satellite imagery thanks to Google’s Timelapse feature. Originally released in 2013, Timelapse has been updated to add four more years of data and tons of new imagery data from two new satellites, offering clearer views with more detail than ever before. Choose any location in the world to see how it has changed – from cities to the shrinking ice caps.

Some of the most dramatic changes have occurred in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dubai and Chongqing, China, but you can also watch the Aral Sea dry up and the Shirase Glacier of Antarctica melt into the sea.

Aral Sea

Miami, Florida

Beijing, China

Las Vegas, Nevada

Shirase Glacier

Hangzhou, China

Look for the location of your choice and create your own annual time lapse at Google’s Time Engine Tour Editor.

Other than a few brief glimpses near airports, few of us ever get to see the Earth from high up in the sky, taking in all of the complex textures and patterns created by nature and human activity. If we could, we might feel more inclined to do all that we could to protect it. This phenomenon, as experienced by astronauts when viewing our small, fragile planet from space, is called the ‘overview effect,’ and it serves as the inspiration behind a series of stunning aerial photographs by Benjamin Grant.

‘Overview: A New Perspective of Earth’ is a new hardcover book full of over 200 aerial images taken of sites all over the world, from industrial areas of South Korea and fields in Ethiopia to planned communities in South Florida. Grant initially started the project as an Instagram series in December 2013, selecting high-resolution satellite photographs that reveal the extent to which we have altered the surface of the planet upon which we live and curating them into a thoughtful, emotional collection.

“What I’m really trying to get across here is that we’ve entered an important time in human history where our home has been significantly altered,” Grant told Wired in a 2015 interview.

Grant searches aerial shots relating to a specific current event or environmental issue to find the ones that have the biggest impact, striking us as visually beautiful even when the imagery depicts tragedy. Some examples include shots of a refugee camp in Kenya, shrinking ice sheets and the choked streets of the world’s most populated cities. Take a look through the feed on DailyOverview.com, or order the book on Amazon.