Hello! Today I'm bringing a tutorial of my previous photo "Night boating" which I posted on Brickcentral. This post is mainly explaining the whole idea about how I create this night boating scene.
Background: I have been doing Lego moc recently and I am really enjoying it, it’s all about creativity, as I am an interior designer, I found that I can use my perspective to inject my thought into Lego, and that is a fun journey. To begin with this shot, I created a boat moc, the idea was creating a night boating scene, and the boat would be kind of Ninjago x Cyberpunk style, and also the boat design needs to be eastern style, it should be a traditional Chinese or Japanese boat. I had spent approximately 8 hours on this small built, it was way more difficult than I thought (Considering my other interior mocs takes about the same time). I had used a lego boat part as foundation, then started building up the boat house structure on top. I am not concerned about the scale of the boat house space, because I would like to create the unbalance this built, making it more dramatic. I had taken lots of time designing the windows/ doors location for any moc, it’s very important that you leave the room for the light to come in or out, which I will explain more later for the lighting part next.
Set-up:
This is a night boating scene, so I picked one of my diorama bases from previous project, which it’s a beach diorama. I won’t expand the topic about how I created this diorama, maybe some other day. So, the first step was placing the ideal location for this moc, and normally I would place the base in front of my computer screen as background, and this time I picked a night sky image which I think will work fine for this scene.
Lighting:
Lighting plays significant part on photography, and I found that lighting is the key of everything on toy photography like Lego as well. Testing lighting is a really fun part, and sometimes also a nightmare, you will need lots of practice, and patient of learning from mistakes. As in the image, I had used 4 lighting sources. for this image.
Light source 1: Environment
Environment light is simply about when and where is your scene. Like in this shot, it’s a night scene, so I choose the color blue, which it’s a cold color temperature, as my environment lighting (If you want to learn more about the color temperature, I may expand this topic some other days). It’s really depends on how you want to light up your scene, there is no correct answer for that, you can test few more times to determine how strong the lighting you want it to be.
Light source 2:
This would be the key lighting source of this scene, And for this shot, I would like to focus on the activity which only happening on the front part of the boat, it means I need to light up the spot which the two minifigs had been placed. I choose a warm lighting temperature as an interior lamp, the combination of cold and warm lighting would create a amazing contrast to your shots (the same rule applies on reality photography, I may also expand this topic in the future).
Light source 3 and 4:
Sometimes you will find that the whole scene still looks dark, especially the face of the minifigs you want to focus on, then you will need some fill lights to create some accent lighting, As you can see, I placed a fill light on the right hand side of the boat, which I can light up the part you wish to focus on, and also lighting up a bit of the ocean, it created more contrast on the water. But one thing is this fill light should not be too strong, otherwise it would make the key lights looks meaningless. Another fill light would be a small LED lighting which placed on the lantern on top of the boat house, this one is optional, but I like to put some red color in this shot to increase the contrast.
Reflector:
This is very useful tools on your shots, sometimes a simple piece of paper can make your scene looks more vividly, and also save you some trouble for setting up more lights to your shots. For this one, I had used a home-made foil paper reflector to bring some light for the dark side of the boat, which I can show more details of it. I also used a white paper to absorb some environment light to the roof of the boat house, the reason is simulating the actual environment, the sky light won’t just happening on one side, it’s like a dome lighting up the earth, unless I have a extra fill light on top of the scene, those reflectors should give you a satisfied result.
If you have read all above, I hope it could give you some ideas on your next project. For me, planning is important, but also you will need to improvise when you doing the shooting, there is no strict rule of taking a good picture, enjoy your every shots, and learning from it, observe the details on your daily life, those are some tips for your Lego photography, and I think all of that also apply on any photography. Hope you enjoy.
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