FWIW, of the first two examples posted, I prefer yours. Stepping out of shoes and walking forward would result in them facing the direction shown in yours, or something more haphazard than facing neatly opposite of the direction of travel. Plus his looks like two pairs of women's shoes. Maybe that is why the caption says that they've left their "scandals" behind.

dimmu, in art , there is nothing new under the sun. i am a musician and was doing music way before i even started photography. and many times, i have heard the same thing copied from robert johnson, elmore james, tchaikovsky, chopin, charlie parker. examples: led zeppelin, fleetwood mac, beatles, antonio carlos jobim, and almost 90% of jazz music. also charlie parker "stole" from gershwin, and cole porter.
in 1980's when i was playing in vancouver ( i worked and travel all across canada. and is now settled in the extreme east. cannot go any farther)..
anyway, i got really mad when someone "stole" my music i uploaded to mp3.com . i was one of the first indie musicians when mp3 started (in fact , that was how "tan510jomast" became my nickname.  only it was tan510 as a blues composer.
i was in the blues charts of mp3  as high as #5).
 ok, back to my point, i complained this to a fellow musician who was much younger than me.
his wise reply was, "it's not important to be the first, only to be the best".

i think that speaks volumes to all of us.  don't worry. if yours is in fact the best,
the buyers will show you.
cheers. (sorry i wrote so much. it's a looooong story, an old one. but a good one. something i always remember till this day, as you can see).

What some people really don't understand is... copying.

Dear fellow members, your life - what do you know, what do you say, what you are is copied from others. Very first from your parents. This is how you fit yourself in the community. The way to become original is the "creative copying" of another things, persons, ideas, behaviors, etc. Some people think that "creative copying" of others is originality. It can be, the truth is that the originality is a complex process of comparisons between you and the others, the successful result of the healthy knowledge of what is aesthetic for others and what not, generally saying, what is a good thing and what is a wrong.
Jumping over the "creative copying" the result is the flat 1:1 copying. It's the easiest way. Not so successful people copy the successful ones because the not successful want to be successful. Simple.
Everything is relative.
Being so creative means that you always add something new to old things so you create something new. Please accept the fact that many others will copy you. Please accept that this is the way of life. It's the way of evolution, this is how the species survive, one member copies the another and the successful behavior survives, the unsuccessful dies.
For those who make problems of being copied I recommend to not upload their works so others can't see their work so it cannot be copied.
Please understand the above in positive approach. I totally reject stealing. Illustrating an idea is an amorph thing, everybody can say "the original idea was mine" but sadly this means "I used first this idea". This doesn't means that you own the idea.

...It's also preposterous that a busy, innovative and successful businessman like Arcurs would scavenge the ten thousands of portfolios online for concepts. Sandals on a beach are so obvious anybody hanging around there in a hammock and fiddling his cam at some point had the temptation to shoot it.