How LEGO Helped Me Overcome Professional Burnout
There’s a book by Seth Godin called The Dip that explores something every entrepreneur asks themselves every morning:
Is today the day that I quit?
There’s a book by Seth Godin called The Dip that explores something every entrepreneur asks themselves every morning:
Is today the day that I quit?
Want a LEGO minifigure of yourself? You can now have a custom 3D-printed head made using just 2 standard portraits of yourself.
It seems that Nikon has partnered with toy block maker Nanoblock to create a special set that lets you build a Nikon F SLR, Nikon's first SLR camera that was introduced back in April 1959.
Want to scan some film but don't have a scanner handy? You can actually do some high quality digitization using some LEGO blocks, a smartphone or tablet, and a camera with decent resolution. Filmmaker Zachary Antell uses a method using those components, and his results are pretty impressive.
You’ve finished your photographic masterpiece and had it printed on the finest paper money can buy, but have you had your photo immortalized in precious LEGO plastic? A new website, Legoizer, wants to help you turn your photography into giant wall murals. The best part of the entire site is that the process is entirely free - except for the LEGO bricks of course.
This is pretty impressive: photographer Pascal Kulcsar needed to digitize some old slide film left behind by his grandfather. Rather than purchase a film scanner, Kulcsar decided to combine his technical ingenuity and love for LEGOs to create a DIY slide film scanner using LEGO pieces.
Update on 12/16/21: This video has been removed by its creator.
Vesa Lehtimaki, Shelly Corbett, and Boris Vanrillaer are three photographers living in three different places (Helsinki, Seattle, and Stockholm, respectively) who share a common photography interest: fine art photos of LEGO figurines. Their passion for LEGOography, as it's known, led them to band together to form a collective known as Stuck In Plastic. In addition to sharing their work online, they've also begun to hold real life fine art photo exhibitions.
Photographer Pascal Kulcsar of Mainz, Germany wanted to add some movements to his time-lapse videos, so he built himself a fancy dolly using LEGO pieces. The tiny vehicle has 6 wheels and is powered by a motor that can run for 8 hours of constant movement with regular AA batteries.
This is going to be a VERY long year, and we have J.J. Abrams to blame. Since its release on Friday, the trailer for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens has swept across the Internet like a wildfire.
But as with almost anything viral, it hasn’t completely taken its course until it’s been parodied and recreated a handful of times. This viral sensation is no exception, and we have our first viral attempt thanks to LEGO fanatic Snooperking, who recreated the entire trailer from start to finish using stop motion animation.
We've seen and shared LEGO cameras before, but never before today have we seen a camera made from a single 2x2 stud LEGO brick. That, however, is what a Colorado State student recently managed to create.
Sometime after George Eastman brought a camera into every home and before Apple put a capable camera into every pocket, the toy camera was born. And the new book "Camera Crazy" by Christopher D. Salyers and Buzz Poole celebrates the rich, colorful, and sometimes silly history of these novelty shooters by introducing you to some of the most iconic of the many that have been released.
In the past, we've shared a few different ways to make a DIY dolly, but today's version is a bit more... childish than those. That's because this automated and motorized dolly is made, not out of parts you'd find at a hardware store, but a toy store. It's a dolly made of LEGO.
Human photographers aren't the only ones dragging their cameras to every corner of the globe in search of the decisive moment. As it turns out, a little LEGO man spent a year doing the same thing as part of life-sized human photographer Andrew Whyte's fun 'The Legographer' series.
LEGO and baking powder, that and some Star Wars inspiration is all Finnish photographer (and PetaPixel reader, we might add) Vesa Lehtimäki needs to blow your mind and send you into a nerd frenzy that'll have you digging up your old D&D set.
Well, at least that's how we feel about it, because we couldn't have geeked out any harder than we did when we stumbled across Lehtimäki's miniature movie scene photography.
Here's a really neat DIY idea for those of you who shoot and develop your own film, and also happen to love playing with LEGOs (that's everyone right?). Using LEGOs and a bit of ingenuity, Dutch photographer Jan van den Broek built a semi-automatic film processing rig.
It seems LEGOs are quite the muse for many a photo enthusiast, whether they're shooting creative dioramas or cool 'action' scenes. But one type of photography where LEGOs come in particularly handy is stop-motion, and if you don't believe us, check out the video above by Bricktease founder Duncan McConchie.
Sometimes inspiration strikes when you're out in the wild, climbing mountains and taking in breathtaking vistas. Other times, it happens when you're looking after your 7-year-old daughter and playing LEGOs. You can probably guess how photographer Jeff Friesen's 50 States of LEGO series came about.
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada-based photographer Chris McVeigh is incredibly good at building camera replicas with LEGO pieces. Last month we featured his LEGO recreation of the Leico M9-P Hermes rangefinder camera.
Now McVeigh (who goes by the name "Powerpig" online), is back with a beautiful new camera creation. This time he has built a Polaroid OneStep SX-70 Rainbow instant camera.
If you thought the LEGO Nikon F SLR we shared earlier this week was neat, check out this LEGO DSLR created by Taiwanese LEGO enthusiast RGB900. The realistic toy camera is created entirely out of various LEGO pieces, and features an external hotshoe-mounted flash unit and a flexible camera strap!
Check out this highly realistic life-sized SLR camera created entirely out of LEGOs. It was created by a LEGO enthusiast named Suzuki and is modeled after the Nikon F from the mid-1900s. We've featured a number of LEGO camera creations here in the past, and this one ranks at (or near) the top in terms of realism.
Leica's Hermes edition M9-P is a beautiful camera that comes with a steep price of $50,000. If you don't have a spare 50 Gs lying around waiting to be burned, check out this replica created by Halifax, Nova Scotia-based photographer Chris McVeigh using 114 LEGO pieces. Sure, it may not be functional as a camera, but it's a great conversation piece, and one that you can build yourself at home!
It's an unfortunate truth in the world of concert photography that some bands refuse to issue press passes to "small time" local music photographers. The Killers are one such band.
Last week, we wrote on how you can use LEGO pieces to keep your lens caps on your camera strap when they're not protecting your lenses. A reader named Fearn quickly pointed us to a similar tip published over at Sugru at the end of last year. Instead of using camera straps, however, they suggest tripods as a sturdy way of keeping track of the caps.
Flickr photographer RawSniper1 has a clever way of holding onto his lens caps …
Photographer Dominique Vankan wanted to play around with the old Autochrome Lumière process from the early 1900s, so he built himself a custom large format camera using LEGO pieces, cardboard, and duct tape.
Nanoblock is a plastic building block system that's like a shrunk-down version of LEGO. It has been growing in popularity as of late, and may soon become a fad on the level of Buckyballs. Japanese novelty photo company Fuuvi has partnered up with Nanoblock for a new toy digital camera that can take on all kinds of custom shapes and designs.
We've featured large format LEGO cameras before, but what about wide format? Photographer Giacomo Citti created this panoramic LEGO pinhole camera that features a sliding shutter and film winders on the sides.
Stop-motion projects often require mind-blowing amounts of work and preparation. Just how mind-blowing? Music duo Daniel Larsson and Tomas Redigh (AKA Rymdreglage) recently poured out 100 boxes of LEGO pieces that each contained 650 blocks. They then had two cameras snap a photo every 20 seconds as they spent a whopping 71 hours sorting by color. The time-lapse video was created using the 12,775 photos that each memory card ended up with.
H.Y. Leung recreated the special white edition of the Leica M8 rangefinder using …
Remember those beautiful macro photos that showed the inside of musical instruments as giant rooms? Sao Paolo, Brazil-based photographer Valentino Fialdini did something similar, except instead of musical instruments he used small chambers created out of LEGO blocks. With some clever lighting and camera trickery, Fialdini captured the tiny rooms and corridors as to look like giant architectural spaces.
Italian photographer Alberto Seveso has a wonderful series of surfing photographs titled "Ink Riders" shot using blue ink, water, and a LEGO figurine. It's an incredibly creative twist on the popular "ink in water" project.
German ad agency Jung von Matt created this brilliant series of photographs for a LEGO advertising campaign titled "Imagine". The images show famous characters from children's television shows in simplified LEGO form. Can you figure out each of the shows?
On December 31st, 2011, Oaida Raul decided pay a tribute to the recently-retired …
After seeing the LEGO large format camera we featured last year, Norway-based photographer Carl-Frederic Salicath set out to create his own LEGO camera. Rather than go with large format, he decided to build a more complicated Rolleiflex-style twin-lens reflex camera that uses 120 film. Aside from LEGOs, he also used some matte ground glass, a mirror, and lenses taken from a binocular.
A couple weeks ago, 17-year-old Canadian teens Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad successfully sent a Lego man and four cameras to the edges of space on a weather balloon and captured photographs of the figurine posing with a Canadian flag at 78,000 feet -- three times the cruising altitude of jets.
Flickr user Alex Eylar created this humorous recreation of Pete Souza's now-iconic photo of Obama in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden raid.
Photographer Cary Norton built a working 4x5 large format camera using Lego bricks, a 127mm lens he purchased for $40 on eBay, and a film holder and ground glass in the back.
Using Lego pieces, Flickr user and Lego fan Larry Lars created an uber-accurate miniature version of his home photo studio. Maybe this could be a new method of creating lighting diagrams?
Flickr user Chase Lewis created this working pinhole camera using ordinary LEGO pieces (we featured an uber-fancy LEGO Mindstorm camera before) for his high school film photography course.
YouTube user havok2 created this creative follow focus using LEGO Mindstorm pieces. It’s …