Last Updated on 12/19/2016 by Chris Gampat
All images by Amr Elshamy. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Driven by his love for science fiction, Amr Elshamy has always visualized the scene of a UFO beaming up a house in the middle of nowhere. To make this happen in an image, he used scaled models, photography, Photoshop, and obviously some wildly vivid imagination.
According to Amr, it took him about two months to create one single image: from the start of the idea’s inception to building a scaled model of the house and the final shooting process. Amr mentioned he accidentally bought the wrong size of a house model which he then needed to order a custom-made smaller design of the house he wanted for this particular project. Having the wooden house model with the vintage look in mind, he then used a two dollar LED light strip to simulate the UFO spaceship hovering above the house. Subsequently, for the smoke effect he used cigarettes (though he claimed he was a non-smoker) and hummus to create the sand look, as real sand will look too rough in a small scale photograph. To light the entire scaled model setup, Amr used one flash head from above (from the UFO spaceship) and other LED lights around the set to create the effect he desired.
The image may initially look like the product of a skillful Photoshop manipulation, but achieving that level of sophistication and sense of realism in a photograph makes it interesting to study the making of the image. The immense amount of effort, time, and creative imagination that went into the creative process were the real recipe that produced the final epic scene. Sometimes, a little common sense, quick improvisation, and strong determination to construct a reality out of a visualized concept can result in something quite incredible.
To check out more of Amr Elshamy’s work you may visit his page here.