San Buenaventura Housing Complex

The exceptional afternoon sun reflecting those thousands of recently painted small homes just looked so beautiful, and the lower I flew the better the angle, so I just got out my camera, opened the sliding window on my Bell helicopter, and snapped a couple of shots. —Oscar Ruiz

Photographer Oscar Ruiz appeared on National Geographic’s Photo of the Day in 2013 after capturing this image of the San Buenaventura housing complex, located in Ixtapaluca, on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City. The thousands of tiny painted homes look like a Lego construction.