Tag Archives: Photography

Spooky scary skeletons spell doom for the Lion Knights

In the LEGO photography hobby, light and focus are as essential to the creative process as which bricks to use. Photomark6, a member of the BrickCentral photography community, specializes in shots where the camera is brought down into a diorama, giving the viewer a minifig’s view of the action. (And he manages to sneak a cat into every scene!) With spooky season upon us, Mark delves into the darkness and captures the likely final moments of the Lion Knights as they walk into a necromancer’s trap.

The last stand of the Lion Knights…

The black skeletons with double-long limbs are especially frightening, the minifig equivalent of those terrifying lawn skeletons that loom over trick-or-treaters. And nothing screams horror like chains hanging from the ceiling. Mark uses some scary good techniques in the castle backdrop; the hinge bricks work great as cornices. In the background, Szazz Tam from the D&D Collectible Minifigures watches the knights fall. Can the Lion Knights turn the tides? If only skeletons were allergic to cats…

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Well, shoot! That’s a big gun

Anyone who grew up on first-person shooters like Doom or Quake should recognize a few things in Steve Marsh AKA Rubblemaker’s LEGO build: the industrialized aesthetic, the glimpse of some otherworldly monster just waiting to be riddled full of bullets, and of course the giant minigun.

That's a lot of tentacles!

Tell the monster to wait a second while you inspect the build a little more.

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The blue screen of life

In the bowels of a dreary-looking office building, life shines in the intriguing “Blue Screen” by Loïc Gilbert. Let’s let the builder tell the story behind this LEGO enigma:

The building had stood abandoned since 1992. …fluorescent lights flickered to life, joined by the faint whirring of old desktop fans. Then came the soft, steady drip of water. He glanced at the dim blue glow coming from an old monitor, but something felt off. The desktop wallpaper wasn’t static—it was gently rippling.

Blue Screen

The mystery of the computer screen aside, my favorite aspect of the build is the way every mundane detail is brought to life with ordinary LEGO elements: the post-it note the mouse, the scissors, the ranks of tiles archived away in crates. I’m pretty sure I had that exact computer sitting on my desk back in 2002. Mine never came to life with a mysterious blue screen, though.

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Olympic high dive build is a clear winner

With the Paris 2024 Olympics just days away, sports fever is really heating up. French builder FOXduFutur offers up a cooling plunge with a LEGO tribute to the 10-meter platform dive. The swarm of clear bricks that hold up the diver is a wonderful gravity-defying technique that mimics the bubbles around a diver seen in underwater photography. On that note, FOXduFutur delivers a gold-medal shot with incredible lighting and use of focus that captures the feeling of being underwater and elevates a relatively simple build into something truly special. (Here’s a behind-the-scenes shot of how they pulled off the shot).

Second dive

FOXduFutur created this model for the BrickPirate LEGOlympics Challenge.

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A pattern in the bricks

The overwhelming majority of the LEGO creations we feature here on The Brothers Brick are spaceships, cars, castles, and other objects and scenes. What we see far less frequently are abstract designs like this fascinating one by Crimso Giger. Sometimes it’s good to return to the basic rectangular geometry of the brick and see what emerges. Although presented as a two-dimensional artwork, this build lives in three dimensions taking up three sides of a cube.
It’s part of an ongoing exploration by Crimso into creating fascinating photos of LEGO and the interplay of light and geometry. Here’s one of my favorites. At first glance it looks digitally altered, but it’s pure LEGO. See if you can figure out how it’s done.

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The black knight always triumphs!

“‘Tis but a scratch!” If I didn’t know any better, I would’ve thought W. Navarre built a large scale figure of that black knight. Yet, this formidable figure inspired by Dark Souls has no dismembered appendages at all and is actually threatening. While Navarre hasn’t shown the full figure yet, we see just enough. Leaning on his sword after a day of battle, the knight’s weary position conveys so much character. Navarre’s detailed build is not too cluttered, and we can easily tell what is what, and it works so well.

The Black Knight

“Alright, we’ll call it a draw.” Check out more amazing builds by W. Navarre here!

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Radon-86 gets glowing reviews

Part of the thrill in buying LEGO’s Collectable Minifigures is what builders do with them after they’ve unpackaged them. Yuri Badiner has taken the yellow robot from Series 22 and has given it a job involving radiation that the rest of us wouldn’t want to do. This is nicely built however, the real star here (besides the happy little bot) is Yuri’s exemplary photography. The tilt of the horizon is a neat trick they teach us in art school that can denote tension and danger. Clearly, this is a dangerous environment but this bot seems happy to do it. The way the composition is lit here also gets glowing reviews from us. Yuri is no stranger to good photography and getting his minifigures into hairy situations. Click the link to see what I mean.

Radon-86

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Morning at the Museum

True story; I had a chance to work after hours at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. I was contracted to paint display backdrops for a Mars exhibit. It was late at night, long after the patrons and staff had gone home and a security guard and I were the only two people there. I can say with confidence that a museum at night is a strange and eerie place. Some lights are on, others are off and incidentally, they leave the animatronic dinosaurs turned on so they were moving and roaring throughout the night. This LEGO creation called Morning at the Museum by Alex Eylar reminds me of that experience. To be clear, the skeleton T-Rex is from this set but the environment Alex has built for it and the lighting makes this a stellar creation indeed. Alex is quite good at setting a mood in LEGO. Check out what I mean in our archives.

Morning at the Museum

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This sun-dappled battle is pretty brutal

Sun Tzu said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” However, if you absolutely have to engage in combat, then why not take a leaf out of LEGO builder Simulterious‘ book and deploy a band of fearsome samurai armed with a cartload of rockets? This is a great little battle scene — soldiers scrapping over control of a pagoda-styled tower whilst gunpowder-driven projectiles fly all over the place. The walls of the building are nicely textured, creating a weathered effect and a sense of age, and the surrounding landscaping is well done with the rockwork suggesting a craggy hilltop in a wider forest. But it’s the photography and lighting which elevates this model into something special. I don’t know if this battle is taking place at sunrise or sunset, but the low hazy sun makes for a very pretty skirmish indeed.

LEGO Samurai castle battle

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LEGO soft launches Fan Moments featuring fan made photographs of LEGO built sets [News]

LEGO has stepped up fan engagement and constantly looking for new ways to engage their customers with the astronomical success with the LEGO Ideas platform and many other programmes. Today we noticed a new feature showcased on LEGO Online Shop called Fan Moments. It appears as a gallery showcased between the product highlight and the product specifications page. The section features images that LEGO fans have photographed of their set purchased and built and sourced from Instagram

Click to find out how you can get your LEGO set build highlighted

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On the shores of the sea comes the end of our fellowship in Middle-Earth

The bittersweet ending of The Lord of the Rings is a scene that impacted many readers and viewers such as myself. It is the last we see of our beloved heroes after so many trials and tribulations in their story. In this scene, our heroes join the elves on a boat departing Middle-Earth to “a far green country under a swift sunrise.” Many see this as an allegory for death and the journey beyond, whether it be heaven or something else. Like Bilbo, I like to think of this in a more optimistic way: a new adventure in an unfamiliar land. JNJ Bricks captured the moment in the Grey Havens right before their departure in a striking, immersive LEGO scene.

Grey Havens

The minifigures of Frodo, Gandalf, and the hobbits stand in the foreground, out of focus and facing away. The elves wait by the boat, ready to take them on their journey out of the completely brick-built harbour. LEGO parts make up everything in this scene, from the water to the sunset sky between the cliffs. My favourite detail, the arches, and towers across the water look just like the movie, despite being so small. The boat, being grey, is distinct enough to not blend into the background. The accuracy of this scene invokes the same emotion in me as I experience while reading the book or watching the movie. Now I am in the mood for some of Tolkien’s poetry…

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Quiet solitude

Sometimes it’s all about getting the right camera angle… And maybe some fantastic vaulted ceilings. This monochrome shrine, built by David Hensel, is an exceptional marriage of LEGO architecture and photography. The lighting gives the whole scene a sense of somber and noble peacefulness. And the way that the pieces mesh together provides an element of age. It’s bold yet austere. If you have never tried to build curves like this, take a crack at it. This style requires a patient hand!

Shrine of Sir Simonochrometrical

David recently made another completely different monochrome build. This time photography comes into play in a different way. Also take a look at some of these other awesome monochrome creations in our archives.

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