Last month, smoke from wildfires in northern California caused San Francisco to have the worst air quality in the world for a number of days. Here's a 2-minute drone video that offers an eye-opening aerial look at what the city looked like during those days.
The County Fire burning in Northern California's Yolo County is blanketing San Francisco with smoke today. And when combined with the fog rolling in from the Pacific Ocean, the smoke is giving the city an eerie sepia-toned look that's making it look like it was passed through an Instagram filter.
This striking timelapse is rapidly going viral online. The video captures what appears to be a thick bank of smog rolling into Beijing yesterday—20 minutes compressed into 12 shocking seconds of timelapse footage.
Beijing's air quality is infamous, but while statistics and technical facts can be shocking, one Beijing resident wanted to use the power of a photograph to drive home how bad it really is -- well, actually, he used a few hundred photographs.
A neat way to capture the passage of time is to photograph one scene multiple times throughout a day, slice up the resulting photos, and then combine them into a single composite image showing all the different hours as slices. In the past we've shown examples of this technique done in cities and with sunsets.
Chinese photographer Wei Yao of Reuters used this same concept, but instead of shooting photos over a number of hours, his image spans days. Instead of focusing on the passage of time, his image highlights Beijing's serious pollution problem.