A Look at How Michael Paul Smith Creates Historical Photos with Incredibly Detailed Models

Here’s a fascinating video about how photographer Michael Paul Smith creates and photographs Elgin Park, a 20th century town created through miniature 1/24th-scale models. Smith creates incredibly realistic photos by capturing the detailed dioramas with an ordinary compact camera, and his images have gone viral in recent years on the Internet (the project has over 70 million views on Flickr).

The video was created by Animal, which will soon be publishing Smith’s photo book on this project.

Everything in each of Smith’s scenes was made by hand — well, everything except the 1/24th-scale diecast car models. Animal wanted to give the world a glimpse of the brilliant mind behind the images, so the publishing group interviewed Smith and captured some behind-the-scenes footage of projects coming together.

Here are some recent behind-the-scenes photos and the resulting images of Elgin Park:

Head on over to Smith’s Photostream on Flickr to see more of his amazing work. You can also preorder the Elgin Park photo book now for $35 — it contains a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at Smith’s work.

Image credits: Photographs by Michael Paul Smith and used with permission