Source: BBC

See a tulip farm that looks like a Mondrian painting – and more striking photos of the planet’s landscapes taken via satellites in space.

Port of Antwerp, Belgium

“This all started as a mistake,” says Ben Grant. With fewer than 1,000 posts Grant has turned Daily Overview, a collection of satellite images of the earth that look like minimalist paintings, into an Instagram sensation with over 445,000 followers. While working at a brand consulting firm in New York City, Grant started a ‘space club’ to bring his colleagues together during their lunch hour. It simply involved using Google Earth to see how different parts of the globe appeared as two-dimensional images shot from above. The first place Grant explored was the aptly named Earth, Texas, where he was struck by how a pattern of crop circles looked like a work of modernist art – especially when given an aesthetically pleasing crop. He started posting the images captured from Google Earth on Instagram, but a concern over copyright led him to partner with Digital Globe, a company that runs four satellites in orbit, two of which have the high-resolution cameras Grant needs. He then scours massive photos that have 10 times the resolution of Google Earth images – each pixel, in all of the following images, represents exactly 30cm (11.8in) on the ground – and then finds framings for features that strike him as exceptionally beautiful or that demonstrate humanity’s impact on the planet. “What is different with this photography is that there is always much more information outside the frame,” says Grant. “So you’re always making a decision about what to show.” Some of his best photos are now being collected into the book Overview, published by Amphoto Books. (Credit: Reprinted with permission from Overview by Benjamin Grant, copyright (c) 2016. Published by Amphoto Books, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc. Images (c) 2016 by DigitalGlobe, Inc)

A tulip farm, The Netherlands

“This is an example of incredible human ingenuity,” Grant says of a massive tulip farm located in The Netherlands. “Imagine the expertise developed over centuries that results in these specific colours being produced – it’s the intersection of humanity and nature.” Grant has divided his Overview book into chapters that focus on different ways humanity has had an impact on the earth: Where we harvest, Where we extract, Where we live, Where we waste, etc. Some days when scouring the images provided by the Digital Globe

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