Trying to work with ice in an often slow-moving process such as toy photography can be a real pain. It seems that just as you’ve finished getting the light how you want it, the ice has melted enough to pool water around it and slide away. In this video, I show you how to use…
Category: Behind The Scenes
How to Shoot Toys Underwater with Orbeez
One of the challenges of shooting toys underwater is preventing them from floating right to the top. You can use wires to hold the toys in place or fishing line to anchor them, but those methods can be tedious. In this video, I show one easy and fun way to do it using Orbeez. If…
Behind the Scenes: Tomek Skog
Photos of shiny, happy people doing shiny, happy things practically dominate my LEGO photography feed on Instagram. Granted, my preferences lean toward minifigs from the CREATOR theme and the Collectible Minifigure series so bright colors and moods are the expectation. One LEGO photographer who departs from the tendency towards all this glee and squee though…
Behind the Scenes: Luigi Priori
I am not a builder, or at least, I’m not very good at building MOCs (My Own Creations) so most of the time my LEGO photography is set in natural or found environments. Sure, I have a few brick-built elements and a couple of sets that I sometimes use as backgrounds in my photos, but…
Behind the Scenes: Yuri Badiner
There are some LEGO photographers out there who, no matter what you’re doing with your own photography, just make you seem lazy by comparison. Yuri Badiner is one of those guys for me. His complicated staging with wires and adhesive putty brings minifigs to life as they stumble, tumble, float and fall in his wonderfully…
#inthestyleof Brick Sailboat: Almost There
Brick Sailboat’s style is more than just low angle composition techniques, but it is a dominant feature, so that’s where I am going to start for my first entry. Setup and Environment I had planned an outdoor shoot on the top of the brownstone building so I could get some blue sky in my scene…
Behind the Scenes: Brick Sailboat
When I started LEGO photography a few years ago, I thought I was pretty cool sacrificing my knees to get eye-level photos of my minifigs. I was so rugged putting my camera unprotected on the ground. I am working it! I am legit! Then Brick Sailboat showed up on my feed one day and quickly…
Behind the Scenes: Maiko in the Rain
There are many techniques minifig photographers can use to separate the subject from the background. The most common techniques are using a shallow depth of field, where just the minifig is in focus but the foreground and background are completely out of focus; and color, where the minifig stands out because of a dominant color….
Behind the Scenes: Stroboscopic Dancer
Ever since I saw Joe McNally capture the sequence of a dance in a single long exposure several months ago, I have been aching to try the technique myself. The advanced technique Joe used is called stroboscopic flash, or repeating flash in some other camera systems, and involves using an off-camera flash to light the…