A friend wrote “They are so realistic that the pictures with him in them are creepy!”  He’s not wrong.

Michael Paul Smith has loads and loads of patience.  Enough patience, as a matter of fact, to produce the picture above from the hand-made elements below.  It’s shocking how realistic his photos are.  And of course, they’re not just realistic; they’re quite beautiful, too.  They remind me of a trove of my mother’s pictures I stumbled across last year. They feel like a window into another time.

In addition to the astonishingly meticulolusly-crafted scenes, photographed in stunningly realistic style, each picture on his Flickr account include a description of the photo, and his memories that inspired the scene.  Absolutely fascinating.

Of course, like any really good story, there’s a dark side, too. I’ll let him tell you in his own words.