Brick Generals: Asian-themed Custom Minifigs

Feeling the sting from not being able to buy the Chinese New Year’s Eve Dinner 80101 and Dragon Dance 80102 sets last year, I started searching for minifig customizers that specialized in creating Asian-themed characters and stumbled upon Brick Generals in Singapore. Brick Generals has a whole range of minifigs from Lunar New Year revelers…

BrickWarriors: Custom accessories for LEGO minifigures

One of the reasons why I love shooting LEGO minifigs so much is that their modular design makes it very easy to create new characters and tell different stories with them. I don’t need to bust out the X-Acto knife and “kitbash” a minifig; I can simply swap out body parts as desired. But as…

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…

#inthestyleof Foolish Bricks: The Grave Robber

I have to admit that I really look forward to the editing part of my photography workflow. Because I shoot in RAW, it’s also a necessary part. In general, I like knowing how things work and tweaking them so being able to edit what the camera sensor really captures versus what the camera processes as…

#inthestyleof Dudu Simas: The Cyprian Centaur

I’ve had a scene like this brewing in my head for the last couple of weeks but since I was on vacation in Spain and the UK, I couldn’t shoot it. But today, my son and I bested jet lag and woke up at a reasonable time to bike to this secluded spot along the…

#inthestyleof Amber: The Music Attic

Several days ago, I went behind the scenes with Amber to see how she shoots her warmly lit brick vignettes and I also launched the #inthestyleof_nocturnelle9 challenge. I’ve got to admit, I thought this challenge would be a breeze since I already had a smaller modular CREATOR set to use as the brick-built environment and…

#inthestyleof Renner_Lego: Cereal Unicyclist

In the second installment of the #inthestyle of series featuring Renner_Lego’s fun photo of a waiter tripping and spilling sugar cubes, I issued a challenge to use real food and minifigs in action. I didn’t want to buy anything so I scanned the fridge and the cupboard, taking mental inventory of the food items in…

Create a Custom Minifig Contest

If you follow my toy photography account on Instagram, you may have noticed that I tend to shoot non-stock minifigures like this hipster who is totally not inspired by my neighbor. Non-stock minifigs are those that I’ve created by mixing and matching parts and accessories from LEGO and customizers like Citizen Brick, BrickWarriors, SI-DAN, and…

MiniMan Studio: Create Your Own Minifigure Review

The lifeless beach babe above is definitely not a LEGO minifigure. Apart from the dead giveaway (I’m sorry, I had to), your second clue should have been her stylish swimsuit top. LEGO doesn’t make nice bikinis for the ladies (see Exhibit A: Fun at the Beach people pack). Nope, this moribund minifigure was all my…