A single sweeping shot seems to capture an entire spring season of blooming flowers in this artfully directed time-lapse video, which took three years to record and complete. Filmmaker Jamie Scott captured almost all of the footage on a soundstage in the closet of his New York home, often against a black backdrop, placing the flowers in stark relief as they unfurl.

The sped-up result almost makes them look like sea creatures waving around under the sea, tentatively opening and then closing again as the camera passes over them. Scott started out filming the flowers from the front, but realized the effect was more dramatic if he shot them from above instead, shifting focus as he went.

In a behind-the-scenes interview with F-stoppers, Scott explains that he made the film in contrast to his previous time-lapse work entitled Fall. The difference between the two films isn’t just the season, but also the close-up shots, shallow depth of field, classical score and placing the camera on a slider.

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.

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.”

A 150-foot-tall figure of a man walking materializes on a Manhattan sidewalk, slowly coming into focus as the city awakens around it, in a new time-lapse video. French photographer and street artist JR directs a team of workers who can be seen scrambling around the piece like worker bees as the hours pass, the sun arcs over the site and thousands of people mill by.

The New York Times commissioned JR to create the piece for an accompanying story on walking in the city, and produced the video. A camera perched atop the adjacent Flatiron building captures the action as the team wets the pavement before dawn, preparing to adhere the giant paste-up.

It’s cool to see the process behind installing a wheat paste project this big, and the time lapse shows just how much work goes into it despite the fact that it’s not being hand-painted onsite.

JR is known for journalistic murals made of his own photography, putting giant faces all over urban structures like walls, roofs, streets and train cars. The photo-realism is especially effective when it’s paired with aging, deteriorating surfaces.

Unlike freeze-frame photography that captures a tiny cross-section of a moment, time-lapse, long exposure and motion blur photography shows a series of moments.  They can be a few consecutive microseconds, moments spanning several years, or anywhere in between.  Rather than an ultra-fast shutter speed, time-lapse and motion blur photography use a very slow shutter speed or multiple images to convey time and/or movement.

Motion blur photography often features one part of the picture in perfect focus while the moving parts are blurry.  Mariano Kamp’s pictures of athletes on bikes in the Ironman Triathalon are great examples of how motion can be shown without obscuring the subject entirely.

Moving lights are a favorite subject of motion blur photographers.  Brent and MariLynn’s pictures of carnival rides effectively capture the chaos and fun of the rapidly moving machines with their brightly colored lights.

Long exposures can make for extremely interesting photographs of scenes that we don’t often get to see.  Kris Klop’s photos of planes taking off show beautiful light trails that seem to make a road in the sky.

The motion blur photography of Johan L demonstrates how a longer exposure can successfully show movement, even in a still photograph.  According to the photographer, his goal was to capture the motion of dance in photographs – something that he obviously did very well.

Carl Rosendahl’s long exposure photographs show a slightly more magical side of ordinary objects.  The motion trails from the moving dice and streams of light from a car-mounted camera bring a sense of motion to the still photos without introducing any visual clutter.

Light painting, or light graffiti, has been growing in popularity since that one fateful picture of Pablo Picasso started making the rounds among photographers.  Today, the availability of good instructions and great equipment has made it possible for amateur photographers to get incredible results with this method.  Painting with light in a photograph requires a long exposure time and quick movements of the light source to create ghostly shapes in the finished photo.  Jacob Carter’s light painting photos show how much expression can be achieved with a light source and some willing friends.

Robokon GT has some particularly playful examples of long exposure light graffiti.  His neighborhood-wide Pac-Man game and crazy colored monsters seem almost like cartoons come to life.

The light writing of Eran Hakim takes on some subjects you don’t often see in light photography: the secret world of your inanimate objects. His indoor light graffiti makes good use of his living space and the objects in it, interacting with the surroundings and nearby props.

When most of us think of time-lapse photography, we think of many consecutive images played together as a long string. That type of time-lapse photography allows us to see a long stretch of time in a compressed format. This time-lapse video from DigitalMaxz goes from LA to New York in just four minutes.

Rotting food is definitely one of the more popular subjects of time-lapse photography. The progression of an object from ripe and full of life to shriveled, moldy and dead is surprisingly fascinating to watch when the process is sped up. Time-lapse images are often made using video cameras to catch a second – or a fraction of a second – of the picture. Then a certain amount of time is allowed to elapse before the next image is recorded…effectively speeding up time.

The growth of living things is usually too slow for us to notice, but when time-lapse photography is used to show a gradual change at a speed that our brains can register, it’s a magical sight. These time-lapses of growing mushrooms give us a look at a part of the world that we usually don’t have time to notice.

And some things are just more entertaining in time-lapse. This video of a house being demolished after Hurricane Katrina, and a modular house being built in its place, makes the whole process look almost fun.