With outside photography on hold I tried a number of indoor photography projects, such as my Embryonic collection - made from oil floating on water, and my Creative Portraits collection which sees my children being photoshopped into various scenes but, as the days of lockdown turned into weeks and months I found myself wanting to get my teeth stuck into a more substaintial project - and that's where the first Lego photos stemmed from.

The image opposite The image above shows the first setup I tried out, a simple piece of yellow cardboard held up with some KNEX and a single Lego Stormtrooper Minifig, lit by an old lamp..

Below you will see the first part to this collection, with each image being shot in a similar very simple home studio.

Shortly after playing around with some images in the make-shift studio I came across the work of Vesa Lehtimaki (AKA Avanaut)..

Avanaut photographs Lego models in an incredible way and makes them look very realistic, so much so that his work triggered Lego to consult him for the creation of the first Lego Movie! I was hooked and immediately emptied my BBQ onto the cardboard to play around..

I wanted to add some atmosphere to my shots, and almost by accident noticed that blowing on the ash created wonderful clouds of what appeared to be smoke, lots of trial and error ensued and I went from physically blowing the ash with my mouth, to blowing it with a desk fan - the fan worked to create large areas of smoke across the whole scene - but I wanted something a bit more targeted, which is where the lens blower made it's first appearance.

The first image I made using BBQ ash combined with smoke from the lens blower is in the gallery below, titled "Aftermath". These following images shows the evolution of this technique, from BBQ ash to baking powder with LEDs added and various lighting techniques explored. The images are grouped by the Star Wars craft used, and I've included the model number of each LEGO set(s) used to help if you wanted to try to recreate the scene for yourself.