Beautiful Lego in Hoth Photos Have Me in Total Awe

These are not the biggerest of Lego spaceships nor an impossible balancing act. It's justLego Star Wars perfectly photographed using a very clever, and deceitfully simple technique. This is how the expert Finnish photographer Avanaut did it:

In his own words:

There's been some questions about how I do the snowshots. I've given some verbal information about the technique, but I guess, a photograph about my setup is needed. So, I made the photos above and below (in the gallery) just for the occasion.

The setup is simple really: All I use is an old transparent CD storage box, some water and my trusty old A4 lightbox for lighting. For the bottom of the box I have a piece of gray Lego baseplate cut in form and hotglued on a piece of acrylic sheet to give it some weight. Legos float because of all the air trapped inside individual pieces.

Anything I want to shoot is then easily mounted on the baseplate and inserted inside the CD box.

Photographing "snow" in this scale is difficult, and to amp up the challenge I wanted it to fly around. The answer was not to use faster shutterspeed but to slow the snow down.

I had a wacky idea to submerge everything in water, it slows down everything that moves. The water also causes light to reflect from solid surfaces in a way that sometimes helps hiding the miniature scale. This is an old concept I've been toying with for ages. For the snow I use ground plaster of Paris—reacted, not unused gypsum powder! It is a passive material that doesn't stick to anything.

Lighting is done with the lightbox freehand as you can see from the photo below.

I shoot a lot of frames because the "snow" is impossible to control exactly. And then some Photoshopping is in order, but not always, sometimes none is needed.

Simply amazing. Check the rest of his awesome work in his Flickr page. [Avanaut in Flickrand Lego on Hoth]