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 The previous splicing technology was no longer applicable.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.

The second-tallest building in the world seems to appear out of nowhere, shooting into the sky as if of its own accord, in this stunning time-lapse video of the skyline in Lujiazui, China taken over a four-year period by filmmaker Joe Nafis. The 2,073-foot Shanghai Tower is surpassed only by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai and features a double-decker elevator offering the longest single elevator journey in the world at an amazing 1900 feet in under a minute. Its construction has made the skyline even more iconic, dwarfing all of the other buildings in the city.

Every single shot taken by Nafis is a work of art – razor sharp, beautifully composed, dynamic – and seeing them all put together in the final video is breathtaking. The filmmaker spent 1,000 work hours taking and editing 350,000 photos to capture the process as each of the 128 floors is built.

“Construction had already begun when I arrived in the city in 2009,” says Nafis. “The site was a large hole in the ground with construction crews milling around pouring concrete for the base. I began exploring the city looking for views and locations that would serve as groundwork for this video. In 2011, I secured a location with unobstructed views of Lujiazui where I could just glimpse the tower peeking behind the 185m (607 feet) Aurora Plaza.”

“I maintained a camera there for the next 4 years until the tower was completed. In the meantime I took hundreds of thousands of photos from various viewpoints around the city filling up around 8TB in the process. In all, over 1000 hours were dedicated to this project in exploring, shooting and post-processing.”