To create this work, I mixed a 3D rendered labyrinth with some photos. The final photo is composed by these three kinds of images, created in this order:

Hands: I used a Canon 17-40L lens at 17mm, f/20 to get a lot of dof and flash on the right with a small softbox.

 Sand falling:

I needed to get some photos of sand falling and merge them together to create the parts where the labyrinth was melting. My photoshop skills are very limited so I had to get a good perspective and shoot at 17mm too in order to facilitate the edition. I did some tries using a shutter speed of 1/30, also f/20 and natural light to get a kind of “silk effect”, but when I joined the captures with the 3D labyrinth, the result looked like plastic. I repeated the sand captures using flash to get the opposite appearance (freeze the motion), and I stuck with that setup for the rest of the photos I needed (just 3 or 4).

Labyrinth: Modeled with 3D Max 2014 with iray. First I created in Photoshop a 2D image in black and white with the labyrinth I wanted, until I got this:

I added some layers and used the gradient tool to darken the corners so that the labyrinth appeared that was melting when applying later the “displace” modifier in 3D Max (depending on the shade of gray, the height of each wall will differ).

Then in 3D Max, applying the modifier “displace” I used the displace map created to get the 3D appearance. With the modifiers melt, noise, wave and bend I added some imperfections, and also edited the mesh of the labyrinth to melt much drastically the middle part and the sides. Result:

Each part was processed with Lightroom to add some dramatism by using clarity and blacks, and changing the temperature of the captures, and also desaturating to have a similar appearance in all of them and facilitate the Photoshop part.

Final photo: