12,220 photos on 70 nights over four years. That's a combined exposure of 2.2 million seconds (plus 4,000 hours of post-processing)!

Samy Al Olabi (@samyolabi) was crowned HIPA Photographer of the Year for his astrophotography portfolio, which, excuse the cliché, is truly out of this world. The Egyptian Syrian multi-award-winning photographer has lived in Dubai for over two decades and enters the prestigious Hamdan International Photography Award (@hipaae) almost every year. But 2024 marked some successful astrophotography projects for Samy, garnering global attention. You could say his HIPA win was written in the stars.

His highly technical and mesmerizing body of work comprises a stunning array of celestial imagery, including parts of his magnum opus, 'Heavens & Earth | A Journey Through Space & Time'. Part of this ongoing project involves a jaw-dropping deep-sky panorama that was photographed in Arabia over 70 nights, during a four-year period, and comprises an incomprehensible 12,220 photographs.

I got to sit down with Samy at the HIPA 2024 awards ceremony in Dubai, where we spoke about working on one of the most involved photography projects I've ever had the pleasure of seeing.

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The HIPA Photographer of the Year category stands out for its entry requirements being a portfolio of images, rather than a single entry. Samy explains his submission: “It's a group of portfolio images and projects that I've been working on for the last year. One of them is ‘Heavens & Earth’, where I put a big mosaic of different types of landscapes, adjacent to different objects in the sky.

"The other photo that I submitted is a bit of a panorama of the sky, which I have been taking for a number of years. I used wide-angle lenses and different focal lengths up to 600mm for different types of objects in the sky, then I started stacking it all together in one single shot so it would be a bigger-pixel, high-definition image.”

And he’s not finished yet. “I'm still in the middle of this project because I'm trying to mix virtual reality with it as well because panoramas and 360-degree views can be really good at putting you in the same location as the photographer. I'm still working on this idea, trying to develop it whenever I have the time."

Samy is no stranger to the best Nikon cameras, being largely a Nikon photographer. 'Heavens & Earth' was captured using a Nikon D780, D810A and Z6. However, he’s not averse to shooting on the best camera phones, too. He explains: “Usually, I travel with multiple cameras, so I have two cameras for time-lapses and one camera mounted on the star tracker so I can take deep-sky astrophotography with the stacking technique, and I have another camera for regular shooting, like taking selfies with the stars and casual shots. In recent years, I've also been using my phone’s camera; phones are getting very advanced now, and this is really helping a lot.”

Samy first started taking photography seriously in 2009, when he picked up his first SLR camera, but didn’t get bitten by the astrophotography bug until 2013. This was a byproduct of camping and off-roading when he was exposed to the night sky in all its glory. Things really began to snowball when he captured a night-sky panorama from the desert in Dubai. He says: “It got very famous and was chosen by Microsoft as its main background image for Windows 7 or 8, back in 2014. At that time this triggered a lot of motivation and I carried on shooting panoramas. I'm still doing that now. I mixed deep-sky astrophotography with it as well.

For more information on HIPA, visit the competition's website. For more information about Samy and for more on 'Heavens & Earth' and how the ongoing project is evolving, visit his website.

Check out previous Photo of the Day images, and the stories behind them.
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