Photographer Recreates Apollo Launch and Moon Landing Photos with LEGOs

Toy photographer Benedek Lampert recently teamed up with LEGO Hungary to recreate some of the most iconic photographs from the Apollo 11 mission in honor of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. The resulting images are truly impressive and are captured almost entirely in camera.

LEGO Hungary got in touch with Lampert because they had just released the LEGO Moon Landing sets, and wanted to show them off in some cool ways. It’s safe to say Lampert went above and beyond, as you can see from this side-by-side comparison of the real Saturn V launch next to Lampert’s LEGO version:

He recreated several iconic scenes and famous images using only these LEGO sets and some props he built himself.

For the Saturn V launch, he built a launch tower out of cardboard and used cotton balls to recreate the massive clouds of smoke. For the moon landing shots, he recreated a lunar surface with powder and a few different size weights “dropped” on it to create craters. He even found the right angle for the light source when recreating the photos of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon.

“The natural effects (like smoke or dust) are very complicated to make because you cannot calculate what will happen,” Lampert tells PetaPixel. “I spent many hours with each of these pictures. The Saturn V picture was the most complicated because of its size, and I had to solve the massive smoke effect.”

Here are a few more behind the scenes images:

Here are the final shots:

And here is a behind-the-scenes video that shows the whole process from start to finish:

To see more of Lampert’s work, check out some of our previous coverage of his impressive toy car ads, and then head over to his Instagram profile, YouTube channel, or Facebook page for even more.

Image credits: All photos by Benedek Lampert and used with permission.