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Colorful Drone Photos Take You Soaring Over Hong Kong

Andy Yeung captures sublime photos of one of the world’s most dense cities.
All images courtesy of the artist

Anyone who’s ever flown into or out of a major city knows that the sublime scale of a metropolis is impossible to comprehend when you’re on the ground. Photographer Andy Yeung mines the amazing feeling of seeing huge cities from above in his drone photo series Urban Jungle and Urban Fog, which capture aerials of Hong Kong that illustrate just how dizzyingly large and beautiful the city really is.

“When I was travelling back from Europe, I had an intimate aerial view of Hong Kong from above,” Yeung tells The Creators Project. "Looking down, I saw gazillions of buildings soaring high into the skies, and the idea of creating a drone series offering a glimpse into the reality of living in one of the most densely populated areas of the world just sprung to my mind."

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Though Yeung’s photos inspire wonder, he also wants viewers to consider the cost of human excess and our hubristic bids to build ever higher. "I hope this series can get people to think about the high-density living in one of the world’s richest cities,” he writes. "And the message that I’m trying to send is that HK is a great city, but lurking beneath the prosperity is a severe housing problem that depresses every dweller in this city living in horrid conditions.”

Yeung submitted his work to the as-yet-undecided National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest, where one of his photos has already been listed among the selects. He uses the DJI Phantom 3 Professional drone to capture his images, which he prefers to shoot at the the “blue hour,” or "the period of twilight during dawn each morning and dusk each evening when the sun is a significant distance below the horizon and the residual, indirect sunlight takes on a predominantly blue hue.” As the project posits a bittersweet contrast between beauty and grandeur, poverty and want, there’s a lovely poetry in fact that these photos are during a time called the blue hour.

To learn more about Andy Yeung’s work, click here.

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