Inspirational Photography... in Lego

A friend of mine sent me a link to a flickr album the other day which totally blew me away. As I've said before, I both love and hate flickr. This is a reason to love flickr.

One of the things I often say when viewing other people's photos is "I wish I could recreate that shot". Well, Balakov has recreated some of the most famous photos of all time in Lego. His Classics in Lego set contains macro photos in which Lego figures are posed to recreate a famous picture. Not only does Balakov give you the Lego picture, but he links to a copy of the original, and shows the setup of the shot too.

One of my favourites of his collection is the recreation of the Tennis Girl photo from 1976 (seen on the right). I unfortunately, never bought the poster as a kid. I certainly knew of its existence. There is a great story about the photo on wikipedia, which, for me, gives it even more importance in the world of photography.

 

Balakov's most recent (re-)creation is of the 1967 Bigfoot sighting. This is yet another image which has been in and out of sight during my lifetime. Every time someone announces they have seen bigfoot, the news/documentary/magazine drags out this famous still for comparison.
In this picture, I particularly like the fact a Chewbacca figure was used. I think it adds a certain irony; one picture contains a fictional furry character from a famous film, the other contains Chewbacca. :-)

The only problem I have now is that I see these images and say "I wish I could recreate that recreation of that shot"...

All images were used in this article with prior permission from the author. Thanks Balakov.

Post Processing Fun

Part of my enjoyment of photography is the thrill of the hunt. I like trying to find a good shot, and then playing composition/exposure/aperture roulette to get the film to see what I see. I have taken many photos which I thought would look good, only to see I could have used a different aperture to reign in the depth of field.

Nowadays, in the digital age, this isn't as big a problem as it was during the 35mm days. One of my pictures of the last entry was a little red flower. When I brought it up on my monitor, I felt that the picture could have benefited from a shorter depth of field. Just one stop would focus the eye in on the flower, and hide a not so exciting background. So I went about trying to do this manually.

I use GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as my photo processor mainly for the fact I cannot afford Photoshop. The advantage of GIMP is that it is free and contains many of the features of Photoshop.

So, a quick bit of searching lead me to GIMP Guru's tutorial. I followed the instructions and came up with this:

So, from this:

We get this:

I think it works quite well. Click on the pictures to see the larger versions.

Macro Fun

Having bought my snazzy Canon Powershot, I haven't done much photography with it. However, a couple of days ago it was just light enough when I arrived home to take some photos.

One photographic technique I enjoy is macro. Nearly everything looks dramatic when taken so close that one can see all of the fine details. My new camera has a macro function which works quite well. I was very surprised by the quality of the shots, particularly when they were handheld. I think the built-in image stabiliser helped me out a bit. My composition leaves a bit to be desired, but I am rather happy with the results. Particularly the red flower.

 
White Flower Macro

Blue Flower Macro

Curly Red Flower Macro

By the way, if you know what these flowers are called, please leave a comment. I would love to give them a proper name rather than "Blue Flower...", etc.

Macro Apple

Just before Christmas I sent off some old films I had lying around to be developed. You know the kind, you put it aside to get developed, but moved/forgot/etc. The picture below is from when I was testing my old Dynax 2xi body to see if the rewind motor was truly dead (which it was). Do do this I ran a film through and took a load of handheld macros just for fun.

I think this photo came out fairly well. The lighting was from a desk lamp which accounts for the orange tint to the highlights on the rind. I do own a filter to adjust for bulb light, but did not have it on at the time. Still, I think it is quite nice despite the lighting.

I think I will repeat the exercise this year, but with more preparation, and a tripod. I really quite enjoy macro photography.

Watch this space!