Commissioned by the Shanghai government, this 24.9-billion-pixel panoramic photograph captures an incredible amount of detail, and it’s easy to lose hours zooming in on every individual scene. Taken from the top of a skyscraper, the photo aims to “show China’s economic take off to the world,” both in terms of what can be spotted in the image and the technical prowess required to produce it.

You can peer in windows, enter private courtyards, examine the contents of ships or the garments hanging to dry on balconies and glimpse furniture in penthouse apartments. Zoom in far enough and you can actually discern individual items sold by street vendors, license plate numbers and the logo on a woman’s handbag.

https://twitter.com/ciannotseean/status/1075833946418630657

Naturally, everyone’s looking for people engaged in some kind of illicit or embarrassing activity with surprisingly limited success – just a finger up a nose here and there, as well as some glitches.

https://twitter.com/_DD1888/status/1075884427807477761

This guy has had better days… pic.twitter.com/CtHuXgieRp

— LFC devotee (@modaith) December 20, 2018

“At the initial stage of creation, the Big Pixel Team decided to accept new challenges of taking photos with hundreds of billions of pixels by breaking the past limit of tens of billions of pixels. However, it’s extremely difficult. The previous splicing technology was no longer applicable. More images, bigger data treatment and network deployment and loading were new challenges.”

“Regardless of such challenges, we were still full of fighting spirit and successfully overcame such difficulties one by one. After taking photos in the Oriental Pearl Tower which is 230 m high and after data treatment for two months, we successfully created this picture, the world’s third largest picture and Asia’s first largest picture, marking that our team became a top creative image production team of the world.”

Check it out for yourself at Big Pixel.

It’s every Da Vinci Code conspiracy theorist’s dream: getting a microscopic look at Leonardo’s brushstrokes on The Last Supper down to the tiniest flake of paint. In the past, you would have to be a highly skilled art preservationist to gain such intimate access to treasured art, but the wonder of high-resolution photography has now brought it to the internet.

The Italian project Haltadefinizione has put 10 of the most iconic images of the Italian Renaissance online in a flash interface that allows you to click and zoom on any part of Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Leonardo’s Annunciation and The Last Supper, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Verrochio and Leonardo’s The Baptism of Christ, Gaudenzio Ferrari’s Life Stories of Christ, Pontormo’s Deposition, Agnolo Bronzino’s Elanor of Toledo and Francesco Paolo Michetti’s The Daughter of Iorio.

The images may be watermarked, but for painters and art lovers, they provide an invaluable up-close-and-personal view that could never be reproduced by a print or even a trip to the museum to see the work in person. It’s quite amazing to see not just the intricacies to a long-dead master artist’s ways of applying paint to a canvas, but how the paint has aged over centuries.

The clarity of the images also brings out details that many may not have noticed before, even in a painting they’ve seen hundreds of times. For example, in Leonardo’s Annuncation, it’s now possible to see all the little windows and turrets in a distant city that simply aren’t visible when viewing the painting full-scale.
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