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 The previous splicing technology was no longer applicable.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.

A subway speeds by the platform, leaving most passengers with a fleeting impression and fast-fading memories of people glimpsed only for a moment, but not this crafty slow-motion documentarian. If you watch no other video today, this week or this year, make the time for at least one of those below.

In the above video excerpt, Adam Magyar captures frozen bystanders in fast succession (50 frames per second) at a Tokyo, Berlin and New York (Grand Central) train stations. His custom technology captures everything, and limited post-processing generates a kind of three-dimensional panoramic portrait of everyone in view. These finished products come both in the form of prints and videos, but the latter in particular are must-watch wonders.

“In Stainless, I scan rushing subway trains arriving to stations. The images record a number of tiny details of this moment. We see people staring towards their destinations standing at the doors framed by the sliding door windows. They are scrutinizing the uncertain future. Similarly to all my images, their main motivation is arrival. The darkness of the tunnels deep below the city turns these chemically clean mock-ups into fossils of our time. “

Magyar uses slit-scan and other technologies and techniques to, as writer Joshua Hammer describes, “bend conventional representations of time and space, stretching milliseconds into minutes, freezing moments with a resolution that the naked eye could never have perceived. His art evokes such variegated sources as Albert Einstein, Zen Buddhism, even the 1960s TV series The Twilight Zone.”

The extended film from Tokyo is shown above. It is truly mesmerizing to watch the most mundane behaviors caught in mid-act, be it a wet dog in mid-shake, creamer hanging over coffee mid-pour or a woman seen in mid-sneeze. It took Magyar years to perfect his craft – the worthy projects that led up to it (shown below) are essential to understanding how he achieved his current mastery.

If the process behind this uncanny effect seems impossibly complex: his signature un-moving montages came with a great deal of time and technological experimentation. This Stainless series is indeed just the latest in a long line of  experimental photo projects, starting with Squares (shown above) which features collections of people taken out of time and selected to force a grid-like order on passersby.

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Time Stands Still Sublime Slow Motion Subway Panoramas