While you were playing at your beach, a photographer turned his into desert planet Jakku

Nothing like a good visit to the beach right? Some dips in the water, some laying in the sand and some visitors from planet Jakku. Wait what?

Singaporean photographer Mezame Shashin-ka used his time at the beach to recreate the desert planet Jakku. It really does not take much more than a good imagination, a strong vision and a clever edit.

Of course, not all is as it seems:

Mezame tells DIY that the shoot indeed takes place in a somewhat deserty place – Klebang, Malacca in Malaysia.

Situated in Malaysia, this open space reminds me of a desert, complete with hills made of sand that resemble sand dunes, and some pools of water where rainwater has collected over the years to resemble oasis-like areas.

I thought this was the perfect place for some photography works – stock photos for desert scenes (for composites), and of course, for my passion projects involving toy photography.

To prepare for this trip, I packed along some Star Wars toys from Hasbro’s 6″ Black Series line for the shoot as the sand dunes remind me of Jakku or Tatooine.

I brought along enough water (3 litres altogether), got myself a good pair of boots, got myself dressed in light clothing and a hat. As there was no shelter or shade whatsoever for a good 1 kilometre in, I thought it was best that I got myself ready against dehydration.

We asked Mexame about the gear he used:

For this trip, I packed a Sony A7RII and two lenses – the Canon EF 100mm f2.8L IS USM Macro (for the toy photography) and the Canon EF 16-35mm f2.8L II USM (for landscape and composite stock photos). I also used a Manfrotto carbon-fibre tripod (190CXPRO4 legs with the 496RC2 ballhead) as it was light and sturdy for the traveling and for placement on the sand.

While a desert is hot and dry, this was not the case for Mezame:

The weather wasn’t really on our side as it rained when we arrived. This made the sand all clumpy, and you can see it in the macro shots.

Mezame used Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 6.1.1 extensively for the post-processing: here are the step taken to edit each of the photos:

You can see more of ‘The Art Of Mezame’s’ work on their Facebook page and website.