Photographing LEGO

[dr_spock]

It is ok to use a flash. Keep in mind Lego is a shiny reflective plastic. Aiming head on with the flash can leave undesirable results.

Better results can be obtained if you bounced your flash, use the flash off camera, or diffuse the flash, etc. Strobist has good instructions: http://strobist.blogspot.com/

This is with the flash off the camera and bounced off the ceiling.

I like taking at night with the flash. My Lego is in one of the bedrooms. I don't do it much because it might give the neighbors the wrong idea with the flashing behind the bedroom windows...

[starwarsfanatic]

I use a mix of techniques. If the lighting is good, I use natural lighting. If it is bad, I use artificial, which basically consists of a small desklamp aimed slightly to the side of the Lego, which lights it without causing a reflection. I film with a webcam that has no flash, so that's luckily not an issue for me!

[KimT]

This is waaay too good to be stuck here in Community.

It's a General Discussion on LEGO to me, so I'll move it there for all to learn from.

[starwarsfanatic]

This is waaay too good to be stuck here in Community.

What's the matter with community? You say that as though it's a bad topic.

[50missioncap]

I think it all starts with your camera. I stumbled back to the Lego hobby a year ago after reading Jonathan Bender's Lego book. My wife is an amature photographer, so I had a really nice camera at my disposal with a great lense for close ups. I use a canon d50 digital. I built a light box out of construction paper and a printer paper box. My pics are by no means the greatest - there are some at my mocpages account: http://www.mocpages.com/home.php/48018 You can see my progression from not knowing at all how to do this, to taking some at least respectable shots. I've also started to experiment with outdoor lego photography. Here's the outdoor blog I just started: http://mybigbrickyard.blogspot.com/ You should have access to microsoft picture manager if you have office 03/07. That's a great resource for enhancing your images - manipulating the color, brightness, size, etc. I have to say that I enjoy the artistic photography element almost as much as the build itself. Really enhances the hobby. Good luck.

[Big Cam]

Those lights you are using, do they need to be a special type of bulb? Or does any bright (and unnatural) light work as long as it gets filtered through the white paper?

Although this has already been addressed by some other posters, No you don't need any special type of light, the paper as mentioned before is to diffuse the light, so it is more like ambient light instead of a flashlight, this helps to eliminate those flash spots on the reflective surfaces of the LEGO. For the color of light, anything will do as long as you have good editing software. I actually don't like the yellow color that my lights are, but they were really cheap and super bright. I just adjust the color/hue/tint/temperature in photoshop to get a nice natural balance.

Also as mentioned by other posters, using a flash is perfectly fine as long as you are happy with the results.

[StoutFiles]

A lot of MOCs / reviews have excellent pictures taken. I'm not just talking about the clarity though, they completely remove all background images and leave just the model on a sea of white.

For all of you that do this, what is your setup? Do you shoot into a white backdrop or green screen? What software, if any, do you use? What caliber of camera do you use? I'd like to post better pictures myself but to do so I'd like to learn how others do it.

[Big Cam]

A lot of MOCs / reviews have excellent pictures taken. I'm not just talking about the clarity though, they completely remove all background images and leave just the model on a sea of white.

For all of you that do this, what is your setup? Do you shoot into a white backdrop or green screen? What software, if any, do you use? What caliber of camera do you use? I'd like to post better pictures myself but to do so I'd like to learn how others do it.

The Reviewers Academy is a good place to learn, in the mean time I'll move this to general since it's too general of a topic foe Star Wars.

[gotoAndLego]

To easily remove a background, put an easy to remove background behind your model. You don't have to get fancy, set your stuff up outside on a cloudy day and put some white poster-board under and behind your model. A good point and shoot, like the Canon S90, will give you very good results; while you can mess around with its settings, auto-macro mode has yielded some excellent photos. Its currently two generations old so its inexpensive to buy. Since you shot on a white background, cleaning the images up is easy; all you will be left with is shadows on the white and I desaturated them so they are only grey.

Edited May 23, 2012 by gotoAndLego

[RoxYourBlox]

A lot of MOCs / reviews have excellent pictures taken. I'm not just talking about the clarity though, they completely remove all background images and leave just the model on a sea of white.

For all of you that do this, what is your setup? Do you shoot into a white backdrop or green screen? What software, if any, do you use? What caliber of camera do you use? I'd like to post better pictures myself but to do so I'd like to learn how others do it.

Lighting - Snap photos during the day in a sunlit room away from direct light. Use flash with a diffuser. Turn your model so that you can shoot from a direction perpendicular to the natural light.

Backdrop - Use overlapping rolls of plain silver and white wrapping paper.

Camera - Canon SLR. Test different settings until you find one that works. If you're shooting inside under indirect sunlight, try "cloudy."

Software - I'd recommend Photoshop, but this can be avoided altogether if you already paid attention to the composition.

Edited May 23, 2012 by RoxYourBlox

[Flipz]

I recently picked up a standing lamp at a garage sale, which I use for lighting. I have a couple of the cardboard backgrounds from the original LEGO Studios camera set, so depending on whether I want a dark or a light backdrop, I'll fold the backdrop backwards and, if I want a light background, I'll take a few sheets of paper from the printer and set them against the cardboard backdrop. After that I just set the camera to Macro mode and the rest is just eyeballing the shot to make sure it looks good.

Hope this helps!

[Brickdoctor]

I have a very lazy setup.

Few pieces of 8.5"x11" white paper laid out and taped where necessary. No lights, just one window off to the left. Nowadays, I use an entry-level Nikon DSLR and Photoshop CS5, but when I first started in the RA, I used a point-and-shoot and Paint.NET. If you have good lighting, the other stuff is pretty easy to take care of. I adjust things in Curves first, and sometimes I'll get lucky and that's all I'll have to do other than color adjustments and cropping. Otherwise, I use the Lasso and Wand tools to select and delete the background and select any rough, unnatural edges, which I usually just Gaussian Blur until they look good. (I could use Masks and the Pen tool if I wanted a really clean composite, but since I'm doing this with every single photo and all I'm doing is replacing one white background with another white background, it's not necessary)

[LEGOman273]

Any tips on getting good pics from a phone camera? FYI, I have a Motorola Electrify.

[Darkdragon]

Any tips on getting good pics from a phone camera? FYI, I have a Motorola Electrify.

Lots and lots of light. Those tiny "lenses" need a lot of light for getting a clean photo. It can be done but you need lots of light...more than you think.

[Remus_Lupin]

I have a fairly basic set up myself:

• A1 sheets of paper (either black or white, I've leaned towards white more and more lately). I use blue tac to stick two corners to the wall, and the lower two corners to the table top.
  
• Canon 40D (though I have seen incredible work done with decent compact cameras too) with a Speedlite flash unit. I also have a ring-flash which doesn't work so well for LEGO as it does for other things; the ABS is just too reflective. For the same reason I usually have the Speedlite aimed upwards, bouncing off the ceiling rather than pointing straight at the minifigures.
  
• A tripod and remote control to make sure the image is nicely in focus (I also enable 'mirror lockup' on the camera to enhance this).
  
• A 100mm macro lens. I mostly shoot one or a small number of minifigures; I use lenses with wider focal lengths for anything bigger like buildings or vehicles. I imagine something like 18-55 would be good for reviews, where you have to pack more into frame.
  

I think that's everything for me. I'm still learning a lot about lighting, so very interested to hear the response of others.

[gotoAndLego]

Any tips on getting good pics from a phone camera? FYI, I have a Motorola Electrify.

As someone else mentioned, light. Not just light, but bright diffused light where the whole thing is illuminated without any real highlights. A bright cloudy day works best. No Flash and no direct spotlights. If you can place white surfaces on either side to reflect light on the sides of the MOC.

[Paul Boratko]

A roll of butchers paper works very well and is fairly inexpensive... I think I paid $2 for 40'(13 meters)

[Dustin]

Try joining the Reviewers Academy!

[dark1san]

I'm trying to find a way to get good pics of mine, I have good ideas but can't get the lighting right. I was thinking of buying the portable photo box on thinkgeek, but wasn't sure if anyone had better suggestions.

[LEGO Guy Bri]

You can make a photo light box cheap and real easy. I've also seen many members photograph outside under natural light and, of course, a natural background. Both can have great results when done right

[Darth Dino]

Hi

with a photobox as mentioned above you will get even and homogenius illumination. But as dalylight with clouds this illumination is not very interesting. If you need direct spots on the figs, you will also have to scale down your lightsources.

For example: The difuse light will come from a white dome around the object. If you cover the object now with a second black smaller dome (cardboard or paper) you can drill three holes in it: One and two for two "lightsources" from the sides (make them 4 and 8 o'clock fromtopview) and the third a bit larger for the camera. Photographer like me call this "gripper illumination" (direct translated from german). It is mostly used for intense and contrastful illumination just from the sides.

http://pixxel-blog.de/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/HeikeHerden3.jpg

This link goes to a good example for that kind of illumination.

The holes for the light should not be bigger than the object of interest e.g minifig head. To get thebest effect on thehead, you will have tomove the fig to find the right crossing point of the two (or more) lightsources. I would expect very long exposure times, because to should be dark except the light comming through the holes.

Dino

[ShaydDeGrai]

I'll be the first to admit that I'm no photographer (I usually let my wife take the shots that 'matter') but when I'm trying to pick up small details on LEGO creations, my three best friends are a versatile macro lens, a short tripod and lots of light. As has been pointed out a DIY light box can come in handy (assuming the model fits inside). I'm usually working on larger models so I don't have a light box; I use my dining room (which already has white walls and ceiling and multiple light sources on dimmers that I can readily diffuse to raise ambient light levels).

However, ambient light can make it hard to pick up surface details, especially for me, more that half of my LEGO collection is either black, white or some shade of gray. To bring out highlights and shadows on surfaces, I use strategically placed book lights with super bright LEDs. My personal favorite is the Mighty Bright Xflex Light (about 10 USD from Amazon, depending on color) it has a small head with a long flexible neck and battery pack with clip. For lighting a model, the battery pack is heavy enough to act as a base and lets me position the light in tight places (sometimes even inside the model or hidden behind it for backlighting). If the glare is too much, a scrap of tissue paper makes a great diffuser. For accent lighting, tape a bit of colored cellophane or acetate transparency film over the LED and you have a mini-figure scale gel light.

I rarely ever use a flash, as I never get the result I expect from one; though I freely admit that this could just be function of the fact that I never really learned how to use all the features that my wife's camera (a mid range Nikon DSLR) offers - I'm pretty sure that with the right settings it could probably order a pizza and tell me when it's time for my car's next oil change, I just haven't read the manual yet.

Edited September 13, 2012 by ShaydDeGrai

[drdesignz]

I used foamboard from a local art supply store and one of my table lamps with a full spectrum CFL light bulb for my latest project. It worked well, I think, and only took a couple minutes to put together. I didn't use any tape on my light box. I simply propped up the foamboard walls from behind with Lego boxes.

[fred67]

I'm pretty cheap. I have a decent non-SLR camera (Fuji FinePix S1800); and I have several of these lights I got at Home Depot. They can go up to 150 watts, but you don't have to use that, of course. They conveniently clamp on just about anywhere, but I have a couple of old speaker stands from an old surround sound system that I use.

I can loosely tape a sheet of paper over it (billowing out, so that it's not touching the bulb) to diffuse the light... I suppose I could use any number of colors, if I wanted to.

Still, I'm as amateurish as they come despite trying auto and incandescent for white balance, I still get pink pictures that I have to correct in software. Lately I've been sticking with Aperture Priority mode, but the pictures aren't as bright as I'd like them.

For background, I have tri-fold boards in some cases; sometimes I just use a piece of poster board on one of my shelves - but clamping it to the shelf, it creates a cyc so that there's no hard edges in the background. I have some light blue paper that I sometimes substitute to create more of a sky look.

I'd like a light box, but I barely have room for what I have now.

Latest picture here.

Edited September 14, 2012 by fred67

[Paul Boratko]

I use 2 pieces of white foamboard(for stability on the back and bottom))and then I use white banner paper and tape and drape it down over the foamboard down the back and over the bottom piece towards the front so that there are no creases or seams.. I also only take pictures outside on my porch because I think that natural lighting works really well, but not in direct sunlight...