A photographer named Beno Saradzic has put together a visually stunning time-lapse look at Abu Dhabi. Most of it, but not all of it, focuses on downtown Abu Dhabi, near the waterfront.

It’s four minutes, but it’s well worth looking at.

Here it is.

Need some help with what you are looking at?

As I noted, the preponderance of photos are taken in the area right on the waterfront. That includes the Corniche, the beach and where most of the really tall buildings in the city stand.

It’s not representative of Abu Dhabi in its entirety, of course; my neighborhood looks nothing like that part of town. But I don’t suppose you would do a time-lapse video on New York City’s small and dull buildings, either.

Early on, that large, wide building … is Emirates Palace, the over-the-top hotel that has the ATM that dispenses little gold bars. (Should have bought a couple, when I was there a few months ago; gold keeps going up, right?)

Later, the photos that show what appear to be a couple of bridges … that is where the island of Abu Dhabi (to the left) is connected to the mainland. The area is known as Between Two Bridges, but the stylistic bridge to the right is the third bridge from the mainland to the island. No word yet on whether the neighborhood on the mainland will in the future be known as Between Three Bridges … or Among Three Bridges.

At the end, the big building with the onion domes is the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, one of the biggest in the world.

The images made by cars and trucks moving on the streets is arresting, but the traffic in the areas on the video is generally awful. So the reality clashes with the art. Just sayin’.

The National did a story on the photographer, who put together the video with his own money and on his own time.

Something the story does not address, and which I can’t see referred to on the video, either … is where many of these high, overhead photos were taken. A helicopter? A small plane? A blimp?

Is there really a building downtown that is tall enough to make 25-story buildings look small? Have I been missing something?

Anyway, once you get past the paean to Sheikh Zayed, up front (the George Washington of the UAE), you get to the time-lapse stuff, which is fascinating.