I photograph clouds from time to time. Not thinking of spaceships or anything of the sort, only the clouds. Just stopping somewhere for a moment to look at the sky can be mesmerizing. Especially if standing on the shore by the sea with the horizon in sight. With clouds every second is unique. If you look away for a moment a beautiful cloud is gone or maybe something interesting comes up where there was nothing.
I don’t go cloudwatching all the time, just sometimes. I try to have no goals or pressure, merely moments of calm. This happens mostly in the summer because our winter is too cold for those beautiful big Cumulonimbus clouds.
Simple clouds. The bonus in how you often find birds flying in high altitudes. Swallows usually. You don’t necessarily even see them when photographing, zooming in reveals them.Cirrus clouds can be quite pretty too.Closeups of a rising Cumulonimbus cap forming. Sometimes it is not so easy to check the tiny dots among the clouds off as birds. Birds make a darker than cloud silhouettes, when it’s white it is likely something else. Sometimes I see these tiny white dots. Definitely not birds. They were an intriguing mystery until last year when it turned out there is a weather balloon station north of where I live. The white dots are just their research balloons. Not that I ever thought they were anything out of this world.
Yup, clouds are nice.
Due to the huge size of a cloud a small spaceship can’t really touch it. There is no contact surface because a cloud is not very sharp on the edges looking at it next to a spaceship just a few metres long. Therefore my rules of interaction don’t apply. I have rules, you see. One of them is that the model must have some kind of interaction with its surroundings, a shadow or a reflection from a light source for example. Anything to tie them together. With clouds this rule does not work. Unless it’s a really big spaceship maybe, a Star Destroyer or something like that. To make this thing work with my small ships I have to simply work with light, contrast and colour.
Watch the Skies, 2020. Clouds from the window of an aeroplane a few years earlier. I wish I had more of these but when I still used to fly I never had a good camera for taking images like this with me. This was taken with my old Canon PowerShot G16 point-and-shooter. It was a fairly good camera when the circumstances were right. In low light the image quality dropped fast. But if the grain can be part of the look, then why not make the best of it.Over the Clouds, 2018. Enough light for the old Canon PowerShot to capture at least some detail from the calm clouds illuminated by the rising sun. This was somewhere over Greenland I think. I was flying home from Seattle in 2015 and had a window seat.A triptych of vertical cloud images from 2020-2022. Various experiments with clouds from the archives. These were probably all photographed simply from our back yard.Heavens Above, 2020. That X-wing model has no engine lights as it is fixed with the landing gear down. I edited the landing gear out for this but didn’t want to fake the engine lights. There is a nice calm gliding feel to it without them. Smooth, you can almost hear the engine almost at idle speed.The fixed landing gear of the big X-wing doesn’t prevent all cloud works. The big 1:24 scale model in front and the old 1:43-ish scale MPC X-wing duplicated in the background. The oldie is painted in the Rogue One partisan scheme and engines are with real lights in them. No engine light forgery there.
The header photograph is just a cloud, a nice cloud, no birds. I figured it’d work on its own there.
I’ve never been to Japan. I would like to but I suspect I may never be able to. Sigh.
This hasn’t prevented me from admiring the sense of aestethics in the Japanese culture. Or what I see of it through the narrow window of literature, comics and movies. This picture is probably more distorted than I realise but it is what I have.
The Japanese toy manufacturer Bandai offers incredible quality when it comes to plastic injection model kits. It is unlike anything else out there. I’ve built some Bandai Star Wars models but I wanted to try something different. The Japanese Gundam thing looks great, mecha suits, not robots, as I found out. I wanted one.
I knew nothing about the various versions within the Gundam lore, never watched any of the tv-shows, also blissfully uninformed of the variations in the Bandai product line. There were many different scales and difficulty levels available. After some serious googling I ended up buying the Bandai Perfect Grade Gundam RX-78-2 mecha suit in 1:60 scale.
I’ve not built anything of this sort before and for a newbie the kit offered some surprises. Biggest surprise I guess were the sprues with parts that had molded in ball joints. I hadn’t seen anything like that before. It was rather exotic for such an old kit, or any kit for that matter, this model was originally released in 1998. How much more complex the latest version that goes by the “Unleashed” brand can even be? It looks insanely more detailed in photographs. I’m glad I didn’t buy that one. It would have been too overwhelming.
Painting this was very different to what I am used to, all the exterior parts had to be painted before assembly. Due to the precision of the parts, no paint must go on the internal structures, connecting pins and such. If you paint them the parts don’t fit anymore, the layer of paint ruins it. It’s THAT precise! This meant lots of tape masks. Organising all this part by part was not the most pleasant thing about this build.
I wanted this to look different than the stock red/yellow/white so I painted it in white with two shades of blue. Cold, wintery colours, I suppose. The decals that came with the kit were stickers. I didn’t like them very much. So, I bought some waterslide decals online only to realise afterwards that they were for the Unleashed version, not this. I used them regardless and they are all over the place. The colours were wrong anyway so whatever. Wrong colours and details must be somewhat irritating thing to look at for those who actually know this stuff. Ignorance is bliss in my case.
First tabletop photographs of the just painted Gundam RX-78-2. This thing has an astonishing range of movement, fingers and all. And check out the lights in the eyes! I was prepared to hack this for lighting it but due to the complex structure it looked like a very difficult thing to pull off. But in the end I didn’t have to do it, this thing sported lights already, straight from the box!
I have made a few photocomposites with the Gundam model to see how it is to work with. The following two were made with photographs I took on one beautiful foggy day in 2023.
The Guardian, 2023. The fog, which is probably my favourite natural phenomena to photograph in, was amazing the day I took this. Everywhere I looked, just beautiful.The Sunspotter, 2023. The catch in this one are the spots on the sun. They are genuine sunspots. I figured they’d go well with the Gundam model.
Like with most of the models I’ve built there is an idea or two for a photograph when building them. Sometimes even before building. This one was no exception. But the photograph I had in mind with this one hasn’t really emerged yet. I’ve tried it but it has proven to be a bit of a challenge for me. Meanwhile I have continued experimenting with it, like the one with the church below.
The Helsinki Cathedral and the RX-78-2 Gundam, in a beautiful blizzard, April 2024. I went there three times to try this. One time I locked myself out of my car while it was running with keys in the ignition and camera in the front seat. It took 45 minutes in the freezing blizzard for the locksmith to come and open the doors. It cost me 150€. What we do for art.
The white Helsinki Cathedral is a popular subject of photography, a tourist attraction. I didn’t quite get what I had in mind with the blizzard and light but it’s close. I’ll probably try again next winter.
From my early days of photographing Lego I have followed a guideline of not altering the photograph after I shoot it. I set this rule to me myself because otherwise I felt this would be more like a photoillustration thing than a photography project. Allowed was removing wires or supports, adjusting colours, contrasts and such, even cropping. The snow in my photographs doesn’t always flow quite like I’d like it to and I have used patches from other exposures to fix that at times. But this is the extreme. I have always avoided any altering of the image in a way that could be considered constructing it as it was a puzzle. That is to say, the subjects are all there as they were when photographed, not added, removed or rearranged in post.
This simple principle is an ideal, something to go for but not necessarily get overly hung up with. Sometimes I don’t even think about it, sometimes some extra effort is needed. The moons of the planet Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back setups are a good case in point.
With the early snowy photographs on the reimagined planet Hoth in 2010 I quickly realised the sky was a problem. It looked flat. I figured the skies needed something to make the whole image look more interesting. The three moons of Hoth are never seen from the planet surface in the movie but in MY Hoth they turned out to be essential. Only, the moons would have to be ”real”, as in not photoshopped in later. I was a bit fussy with the no-altering rule those days. I dusted my old Reflecta Diamator slide projector and made some custom slides.
The slides I’ve used for throwing the moons or the sun to the tabletop skies. I’ve used this outside the Hoth setup only a couple of times, so it's very much an idea for Hoth only.Figuring out the lights, finding a good angle so that the illusion of the moon/sun would work. At this point it wasn’t clear whether the bright spot was in fact a moon or a sun. In the end I made both versions from this set.The Dawn After, 2010 (Alt. 2024 Edit). This is, I think, the first time I succesfully used the slide projector moon/sun. I edited a new one from the RAW leftovers for this post because frankly the original versions from this era aren’t very good. They were edited in my Powerbook laptop in fairly small size using RAW files from my first DSLR camera, the Canon 400D, with no idea what I was doing. Most images from that time are awfully dark and oversaturated. Also, I favoured that very wide crop ratio then, a thing I do not really like anymore. This image was originally designed for that wide crop so I went with it. The morning sun in this one is just as it was when photographing it, no edits afterwards except for making it a little brighter.
The header photograph, Moonlight Shadow, 2011 (Alt. 2024 Edit), is a prime example of how the projector moon works. This is also not the one I posted originally in 2011. I like to dive into the archives and find alternates, it is fun even after all these years.
The bright moons on the background projected on white or dark blue cardboard sheets sometimes needed tidying. Removing errors in my slide mask handiwork in Photoshop is a thing I can easily live with. Punching perfect round holes through aluminium tape is difficult you see, there are almost always some imperfections here and there and they look huge when projected to the background in big size.
Call of the Wild, 2011 (alt. 2024 Edit). A crescent moon on Hoth, made with a slide projector with punch & die tooled slide. The one on the left is an outtake from the process of figuring out the composition. On the right is a variation of the one I originally posted, not the same exact frame. The moon is not retouched in these.
In total I’ve used this with thirty photographs, give or take.
Transit of a Hoth Moon, 2016. Playing with the idea of several moons of Hoth, different sizes than the one of our Earth, some astronomy thinking kicked in. Our Moon is exceptionally large, proportionally the biggest by far in the solar system. We’re essentially a double planet system. Full solar eclipses like ours are likely quite rare elsewhere in the universe. So, when a moon meets the Hoth sun on the planet’s sky, it might look like this. This was made with the slide you can see among the other slides in the photograph earlier in this post. It needed some cleaning in Photoshop afterwards but it’s real.
The bottom line for this look is that the heavenly bodies are there, the moons and the suns, photographed for real. Until they weren’t.
The Night Blizzard, 2022. This one is a cheat, the sun is photoshopped in, not projected on the background. The look is the same though, or close enough.
With the more recent photographs I have sometimes just photoshopped the moon/sun effect to the sky. But only when I knew I COULD set the slide projector up and it would have looked exactly the same. I mean, my rules, I can bend them if I want to. The look was established with the real thing and I want to keep it looking like that. These days I’m photographing in a space that is much wider and roomier than I used to have but unfortunately it has less depth. There is enough for the camera but not for the slide projector, it makes rigging it a nuisance. So, I cheat.
I have talked about this technique also in my book Small Scenes From a Big Galaxy (DK Children 2015).
Stanley Kubrick’s 2OO1: A Space Odyssey was the first DVD I ever bought. It was also the first Bluray and 4K UHD disc I ever bought. That should say something, I love that film.
There were not too many scale models from the film available until very recently. There was the small 1:144 scale Aurora Orion III Shuttle kit, first released in 1969, later reboxed and re-released by Airfix. The 1:55 scale Aurora Moonbus kit was also released in 1969 with subsequent re-releases. There were some small garage kit runs much later, most notably the 1:32 scale resin EVA pod kit and the elusive big 1:48 scale Atomic City Orion III resin kit. I tried to obtain the big Orion for quite some time but it was like trying to find a living Dodo bird.
A few years ago kit manufacturer Moebius took on producing some 2OO1 kits in relatively big scales. They have several different kits now out. I first bought and built their big 1:8 scale EVA pod. It’s very pretty but has some issues. The detail is soft here and there and it is a bit awkward to build with the appropriate lights, it wasn’t designed for that. It is doable though and I like the big size, it’s great for photography.
The Moebius 1:8 scale 2OO1: A Space Odyssey EVA pod model is big, about 29 centimeters wide. The headlights are easy to light, it’s the inside that needs some work.The EVA Pod has very little or no weathering, which makes the paint phase easier. Just clean white and some decals. The dashboard was a lot of work to make it light up like that. But as you can imagine, a photograph like this would look so much less interesting if there was just a black window there. The effort is worth it.
Then I got the 1:48 scale Aries 1B. It’s practically the same size as the EVA pod, they make a nice pair. Like the EVA pod I preordered the Aries the day it first became available. There are lots of aftermarket upgrade parts available for these kits: photoetch and resin parts, 3D-prints, decals and masks. I've not used all there is but there are some upgrades here and there.
Now, Aries 1B, the actual filming model, has an amazing history. As we know, the original models were supposedly all destroyed after the filming wrapped. Some say it was because Stanley Kubrick wanted to prevent them from showing up in other movies later thinking it would diminish the uniqueness of 2OO1. Some say it was simply because there was no budget for storage. Apparently it is a very complicated story with museum plans gone awry. Whatever the reason was, for decades they were thought lost forever. And some really were destroyed, like the big Space Station V. But then, in 2015, out of the blue, the original screen used Aries model turned up and in relatively good condition too. It was restored, auctioned for $344,444, and is now in The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences museum in Los Angeles.
The Moebius Aries 1B kit is like the EVA pod kit, big, soft on details and not super well designed thinking about the building experience. The big question for me was whether to light the floor of the passenger cabin like the full size studio set piece. The kit clearly wasn’t meant for this, there is thick plastic and seams in unfortunate places. Furthermore the floor can’t really be seen once the model is finished, just glimpses from a very limited angle are visible.
The lowered underlit elevator pit floor in the Aries 1B Lunar shuttle. This is the look I wanted in my model even though it can’t really be seen from the outside. 2OO1: A Space Odyssey photograph from screencaps.com The colour of the chairs vary from scene to scene, in the screencap they look darker than they actually are. For this I adjusted the colours on my photograph to match, the chairs are more yellow in reality.
What’s the point spending almost a week lighting the floor knowing it won’t be visible once the model is finished? It was a lot of work after all. Knowing it is there is one thing of course, there is satisfaction in that. One could also argue the light from the floor has an effect on the ambient light in the cabin even if the source itself is obscured. It makes the ambience seen thru the tiny windows look right. There are 25 individual leds providing the light in the cabin plus half a dozen red leds for the cockpit, you’ll never know there is that many of them just by looking at the model. Maybe this was a little bit of an overkill but it’s also about peace of mind.
These little things I can have control over when building, lighting and some custom details. It’s the painting and weathering what I fear the most. So many unknowns in the cocktail of pigments and layers. It is always intimidating, sometimes also horrifying.
The original Aries 1B has a very straightforward paint scheme. Basically you could say it’s off-white with some panels ever so slightly grey and everything weathered with what looks like black soot from the manoeuvering thrusters. I decided to paint mine like that to keep it real. But, alas, it didn’t look good, not with my skills. It was too simple and to be honest this off-white colour is not really my favourite. I gave up on the attempts to make the model look like the original. It is often harder than it looks anyway. I decided to take the weathering to a different direction. Unfortunately the decision came a little too late to do a layered paintjob the way I like. I wouldn’t know how to do it on top of that white.
In order to not ruin the paintjob altogether I added some chipping and small details here and there, mostly random waterslide decals from the archives. The decals are small enough to not really make anything of them but they add a little bit of nondescript detail nevertheless methinks. Then just some subtle wear and tear. Not sure if this was the right call but the white just felt kinda wrong – even if it was kinda right.
On the left is what I saw when taking the last masking tapes off of the finished model. The clear flat coat paint mist had penetrated the window seams into the passenger cabin and clinged on the inside of the windows. I managed to pry the model open without too much damage to find the mist all over the place. For a brief moment I considered putting the damn thing back in the box and just walking away. The airbrushed paint mist had dried before reaching any surfaces however, it all came off easily with a damp cloth. From the windows I took it off dabbing it with tape to avoid scratching the soft clear plastic. This is what my model building process is, a comedy of errors.Those landing struts, they are very fiddly. I feared the added weight from the lights and the structures to block the light from leaking would be enough to break them. Putting this on the ground supported by the legs only was a genuinely frightening moment. But there it is.
I had some photographs in mind when I was building the model. The header photograph on this post is the first. I wanted to play with interaction of the two 2OO1 models I have. Surely, if the Aries needed attention somewhere between the Earth orbit and the Moon, the EVA pod was the right tool for that. Who said the EVA was a Discovery exclusive? I never heard anything of the sort. Yup, nothing about that.
Original caption for this one when I posted it online: For a few years now that thing has been there. Nobody seems to know the owner, there is no activity around it. It’s abandoned for sure. Looks haunted. Some day I’m gonna break into it.
The wintery field photograph is an edit to this blogpost a week after I first published it. The new photograph needed to be here. It is the final step of the process from first photographing the landscape image in December 2021, building the model in stages in 2023-2024 and merging the two. The original photograph was always meant for this, for the Aries 1B in particular. The news of an Aries model to be released turned up just a couple of weeks before I took it.
In 2015 I got an idea. We were about to embark on a family holiday trip to Italy and a couple of days before we left I rushed to a local camera store and bought the Olympus Tough TG-4, a new version of their waterproof camera, just released. I wanted to try underwater photography.
In the last minutes of packing I threw in an Action Man we had, one with scuba gear. I had tried photographing it in a water container earlier with poor results. I didn’t expect terribly much from this but with Jacques Cousteau in mind I wanted to give it a try.
During our stay in Italy we were in a place where the waters weren’t clear, it was a disappointment, but a few days in our holiday we decided to take a daytrip to the island of Ponza, 33 kilometers from the coast. There I managed an hour on the beach in clear waters with the Action Man.
The first underwater photographs, Ponza, Italy, 2015. I just love that old James Bond -ish feel to this.
The Ponza session was improvised, I was unprepared, but looking at the images afterwards back home I began thinking there was something in it. I bought the then just released Lego Deep Sea Explorers submarine and tried it in our local waters here in Finland. But, alas, our lakes are nowhere near the clarity of the Mediterranean. The photographs were terrible.
Next year we decided to go to Ponza again but this time to stay for a few days. It's a lovely place and we wanted to have a better look. Thanks to our national airline and their overbooking policy our stay got shortened by a full day. In the end I had two afternoons with the Lego sub and the Action Man. This time the Action Man had an orange wetsuit because the original blue had disintegrated. Same thing happened with the orange one after the trip. It is very unfortunate that soft rubber products these days are like that, self destructing.
The second attempt with the Action Man, 2016. This time with the orange wetsuit which indeed doesn't exist anymore. The wetsuits cost way too much to buy another, especially thinking they will melt into a sticky blob. There will be no more of these photographs from me.
Anyway, I was better prepared on this second trip and I got a nice set of photographs. I have posted dozens of them online over the years. I learned a lot of what works and what doesn’t during these couple of days. It was a big leap.
A fun thing happened after we returned home. We watched Wes Anderson’s magnificient The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, one of my all time favourite films, and I realised they had used Ponza for some location shoots.
Octopus’ Garden Vol.2, 2016. Like the header photograph, this is from the second Ponza trip. Photographed on a public beach. Let me just say my little experiment didn’t go unnoticed by the people on the beach.
Not willing to fly if not really necessary anymore I have managed to find clear enough waters from Finland too. Unfortunately they are a long drive from where I live, the waters aren't clear enough in the south. The best I’ve found were some arctic meltwater pools in Lapland but it takes more than a day to drive up there. Then again, if you're on the road anyway, perhaps a roadtrip all the way to the Barents Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean. It is clear and just as exotic as any ocean on Earth. Two days’ drive one direction. I'd like to do this some day.
Photographed in an arctic meltwater brook, summer 2016 on my way to north. You can imagine this diver looking for gold. This spot is actually not very far from where they wash gold from the sediments with pans. Looking at this photograph, you can almost imagine some gold nodules glimmer in the sand.
Looking for potential locations within reach has turned up some interesting spots. Like this underwater freshwater well, Uhrilähde (Sacred Well) in Jämijärvi, three hours’ drive from home.
The freshwater pool in Jämijärvi has a constant upward flow of groundwater coming in. At this spot it is fairly calm but it was more or less accessible from the firm ground by the pool. I tested how to place the sub in the stream and took a short videoclip of it. A photograph I got from the Jämijärvi video spot. The day was mostly overcast, the little pool next to the big pools, or lagoons really, was surrounded by big trees. There wasn’t much light and the camera struggled a bit. Images were noisy, out of focus and often blurred due to longer than ideal exposure. I plan to go again next summer on a sunny day hopefully with better gear.
When photographing in various freshwater ponds and brooks, or even the algae prone Baltic Sea, the colours vary a lot. It depends on the weather too, obviously. Mid-day sunshine is different than afternoon underwater, so is an overcast sky. What is around above the water surface matters, even trees, buildings and rocks. I like that.
From the Baltic Sea. I lost my fisheye lens on this trip in 2020, it sunk to the bottom of the sea, never to be seen again. It was an external attachment to the TG-4 camera, it did not expose the camera innards when it came loose. I liked the fisheye very much, it worked well underwater.A shooting location on top of the Saana fell. This is in Finland but the mountaintops in the horizon are in Norway and/or Sweden.
The TG-4 really is an excellent camera for its size, the TG series are the best underwater cameras in their class, say some reviews. It's quite telling that Olympus with their latest version TG-7 hasn’t been able to improve it terribly much. It’s obviously better but not radically so. The water seals on my TG-4 still work after 9 years of active use, it’s shockproof, offers RAW and has a surprisingly good macro. I've photographed closeups of spiders with it.
I am looking at alternatives to the old TG-4 however. It’s a nice camera but I could use something with a sensor that is more forgiving. Especially if I’m going to spend days traveling to a location again.
Photographing toys underwater in real environment is a fun idea all in all, I think.
I work as an illustrator and an occasional graphic designer by day. Sometimes I like to relax by making some laid back posters with the toys. And by toys I do not mean just the toys but also the tools, the camera and the computer. These posters are not meant for anything, they are just something to have some fun with and maybe to have something nice to look at.
The first posters of this sorts were with scale model spaceships in the summer of 2013. There was four of them and they got some exposure on social media. They still come up on Pinterest from time to time. After those four posters I switched to Lego spaceships. I figured it could be an interesting way to look at Lego to highlight them by not showing too much.
These are not in chronological order but two of the oldest posters of this particular series are in this batch. The TIE is the oldest here, from 2013.
In this first set of four posters the TIE fighter is the second Lego spaceship poster I ever did. Over the years I have scrapped a couple of the early posters and made new versions of them. For example the first Millennium Falcon poster (top right, the first version) was nice but a few years later I made an updated version of it. For a good reason too I think. The Slave 1 was originally made with the old Lego model, this with the UCS Slave 1 poster is, again, a remake.
I’m not entirely sure where I got that high vertical format but I have used it for all the spaceship posters I’ve made. I like it even though it appears to be arbitrary, just something I figured would look interesting. It may be that I simply had a piece of old paper that I sometimes use as an overlay shaped like that.
Some of the Lego models looked boxy from a straight angle and I had to think of alternative ways to show them. The X-wing worked really well, I still like how it looks in this. The B-wing wasn’t that great. It is an exotic design with a weird silhouette and the Lego construct seemed to amplify that. They say the B-wing was difficult to film for the Return of the Jedi. I can believe that, I certainly struggled with it.
I wanted the posters to look very simple, rough silhouettes and most basic forms suggesting maybe locations connected to the spaceships. The Death Star stencil on the X-wing poster is by far the most complex of them all while the TIE Striker next to it is the simplest. I like the TIE Striker by the way, I liked Rogue One too. The movie had well thought out designs, different and new but all stylistically very faithful to the Star Wars original trilogy universe.
These are the latest ones I made. I guess you can tell by the colours that I found some that please my eye and stuck with that. If I ever do more I must go for something different I suppose. On the left the remade Millennium Falcon poster with the big UCS model. The difference with the old Lego model is significant, the update was a no-brainer.
The third batch of posters. I’m very happy with the last three of these posters, the Tantive IV, the U-wing and the Blade Runner Police Spinner. With them I think I managed to capture a look I like with the heavily manipulated photographs and the graphic elements, spheres and lines.
The Blade Runner Police Spinner is obviously not an organic part of this particular series but it deserved a go too. The model is a MOC by someone who goes by the name Kaitimar, not an officially released set. It is actually quite a wonderful little thing.
I have some more Lego spaceships for future posters but haven’t found a satisfactory approach for them. I haven’t put a lot of hours on them to be honest, this is a relaxation project after all. If it takes too much effort it isn’t relaxing.
In the early 2010’s my photographs with Lego, especially with Lego, were rather experimental. The manipulation of air around the little minifigures with smokes and blizzards was the thing I did. I even coined a name for it: “Forced Atmospheric Perspective Photography”.
The idea was very simple. The Forced Atmospheric Perspective Photography was about adding something in the air to scale it down, make it denser. You can’t scale down elements like fire or water but with air I knew it could be done, I just had to search for it a little. Densifying air will help match it with the small scale of the Lego minifigure thus making them look bigger than they are in photographs, less toyish.
The basic idea is not mine, of course. It originates from special effects and miniature photography in movies. Animators use it too, they simulate it with frosted glass between the elements. I used to read everything I could get my hands on about the subject of special effects, magazines and books. I grew up in Finland and finding this stuff wasn’t always the easiest thing. This was before the time of the internet, mind you. I was a subscriber to early Starlog, Cinefantastique and Cinefex magazines, I found books like ILM, The Art of Special Effects from the big Akateeminen bookstore downtown Helsinki.
From the cloud tanks of CE3K and Raiders of the Lost Ark to the Hades landscape of Blade Runner and more, that's what I had, and the idea of using it for photographing Lego and other toys. It was a different and new look with Lego at the time, it stood out. At least on platforms like Flickr, it was the giant for the photography scene then.
From 2011, Early Morning Scout Patrol, photographed with smoke. This was outdoors in direct sunlight using burning paper to create the smoke and hoping to catch some ash too. I was delighted afterwards to realise the tiny ash particles look like insects buzzing in hot morning sun. I lightened the image a bit, the original is very dark and oversaturated. Most of my images from that era are dark and oversaturated, they were edited with laptop using the WYSIWYG method. In retrospect it wasn’t ideal.
Today is February 14th, 2024, Valentine’s day and the 10th anniversary of The Lego Movie in Finland. The anniversary of The Lego Movie is why I brought up those old experiments I did with the brick. They caught the eye of the production team gearing up to make The Lego Movie around 2012 or 2013. In search for the look of the film they called me and wanted to know how and why I did my photographs the way I did.
Now, I must emphasize that the toyphotography scene back then was not like it is today. In the early days there was a moment my photography experiments left me thinking that they were indeed different and I was the village idiot making them alone because everybody else just couldn’t care less. Originally I didn't even have my name shown publicly because of this. I thought that if what I was doing somehow blew on my face I’d still have the protection of anonymity. That's where the “Avanaut” came along. Defying the self doubt was good in the end.
I have signed an NDA concerning the Lego Movie so I can’t say much. I don’t really know if they’d care after ten years, probably not, but I will let them say it for me. Just to be on the safe side.
Here is an article I’ve shared a lot. It's from Craig Welsh, the lighting supervisor of The Lego Movie. In the article on his blog Expanded Cinematography he opens the process of finding the right look for the plastic toy.
The Last Ship to Rendezvous, 2013. This is used as an example in the Craig Welsh blog post. Photographed in smoke filled room for dreamy frozen atmosphere.
Another article in the FX Guide where the film’s production designer Grant Freckelton is interviewed about the very same thing but broader. From the article:
“Animal Logic took inspiration from Finnish photographer Vesa Lehtimäki (also known as Avanaut) who creates realistic scenes using LEGO, sometimes with ‘in-camera’ effects. “We actually talked to him,” recalls Freckelton, “and he described how Douglas Trumbull influenced his work by creating smoke tanks or much much smaller environments filled with much much more atmosphere than you would normally have. That was the same approach we took.”
That's it, ten years ago this was my little adventure with Hollywood. It was grand! Maybe even awesome.
The “Red Jammer” is, as many of you know, the one Y-wing starfighter that never made it to the silver screen, Star Wars (1977). It was the first Y-wing model built, not counting the Colin Cantwell prototype, and is the one the other models were based on. It has slightly different surface detail than the ones used for filming the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars and it was not fully finished on the starboard side. The Jammer was sent from California to London as a reference for the full size studio mock-up used in the Yavin IV hangar scenes.
Sometime in 2012 Nice-N Model Designs released a big 1:24 scale Red Jammer Y-wing model kit. It was an incredible kit, a real gem, and I missed the window to order one! The sell happened at a time I was just only realising these things existed in the first place, big “Studio Scale” resin kits, made in incredibly small numbers. It turned out these were rare as hen’s teeth.
Photographs of the elusive Red Jammer Y-wing model, these were the only ones I found at the time I began looking for images of the original models. Photographer unknown, possibly Steve Neisen of Nice-N. If you look closely you can see the starboard engine is lacking paint, it also lacks details, or “greeblies”, as they say.
The studio scale concept is often misunderstood to mean 1:24 scale in particular but it actually has nothing to do with scale. Studio scale is a replication of a screen used model, whatever the scale is. It is sometimes also said to mean not just the correct size but also the exact same parts and paint job. Studio scale means a replication of an original screen used model as accurately as possible.
I wanted to have a 1:24 scale Y-wing no matter what. I found an unbuilt kit in Belgium in March 2014 after a two year search. The entire production run of this kit was 44 numbered units with perhaps a few unlisted extras made. Mine is number 40 of 44. I believe there was an earlier release with some differences in how the kit was designed. There were also some made later, not the Red Jammer but I think Gold Leader. Or at least there was supposed to be more, I'm not really sure if of this. Nice-N Model Designs website suggests they are not active anymore.
The Nice-N model Y-wing kit, unassembled in box. The Finemolds 1:72 scale Y-wing for size comparison. This thing is big, over 70 centimeters long!
Opening the box with the huge Y-wing kit parts inside was probably the most thrilling and profound moment I’ve ever experienced with scale models. This was a dream come true. It was not just the two year wait but the wait from 1977 fulfilled all at once.
My kit was the Red Jammer, the different one. I was only learning the differences between the individual Y-wing models and it turned out I wanted to have something that looked more like the ones we see in the film. I wanted something from them all, not one particular model – and made with genuine parts! There was some serious research ahead of me.
Ten years ago finding information on these models was very different than it is today. I happened to stumble my way into this peculiar niche of model building at a time when there still were some unidentified parts on the models and the data was not exactly public yet. You see, those bits and bobs on the original Y-wing filming models were resourced from vintage model kits, tanks, trains, battleships and whatnot back in 1976. All those parts were researched and identified in the past ten, fifteen years or so, when the Y-wings were reverse engineered by a group of enthusiasts. They went through hundreds and hundreds of old pre-1976 scale model kits in search for these parts, it is an astonishing achievement.
Photographs of the Gold Leader and the Red Jammer existed but they, along with information of parts and the particular vintage model donor kits, were not available to an inexperienced newbie from Finland just like that. It was frustrating at times even though I understand why the secrecy. Gradually the veils opened though and I got access to some high resolution photographs. I bought about a dozen of the vintage model kits for the correct parts, sourced some individual parts through various contacts, some from Australia, Japan etc, and learned to make silicon casts and resin copies of certain parts.
Then the Gold 2 a.k.a. “Tiger Sprocket” surfaced in 2016. It’s the screen used model that was given to Alan Ladd, the producer who greenlighted Star Wars. It was now in possession of Stephen Lane, the founder of Prop Store, an auction house specializing in screen used film props. Lane generously sent me some high resolution photographs of this beautifully survived Y-wing model. This was a superb resource.
The Gold 2 Y-wing model, a.k.a. Tiger Sprocket, from Stephen Lane collection. These images were made public by the Prop Store in 2016. This is not from the lot sent to me.
Today you can find really good images of all of the filming models. With a little research you’ll find kit lists and part maps from builders’ forums. And let’s not forget the incomparable Star Wars: Chronicles, the Japanese book with great photographs of all the models. Unfortunately it is very expensive these days.
The research and altering the model with genuine vintage parts was time consuming. To add to the ambitious build I wanted to have the model light up for photographs. There are lights in the engines, cockpit dashboard and the astromech droid. On top of that I made removable landing gears from scratch with lights in the gear wells. I also wanted the cockpit hatch to open and close. This all took me to a rabbit hole unlike I have ever experienced before or since.
Some photographs from the build process. On the left you can see some vintage kit parts on the white base kit hull. The yellow parts are resin casts, some made by me, some purchased from around the world, some came with the kit. Then the internal structure with aluminium wing plate and mounting points attached on each side. A detail from the side of hull, a busy area, not the easiest to paint. Second from right genuine Aavid heat sinks used for the engines. I bought them from Germany, they are still in production. Magenta leds were a must. On the right a detail of the scratchbuilt front landing gear before paint, made them from styrene and brass.
I knew I was out of my league with this model, it was my first resin model after all. At one point I put the Y-wing on hold and purchased a Salzo V3 X-wing (a remarkable kit as well) to learn about resin and big scale so that I wouldn’t mess this up. I finished the X-wing before proceeding with the Y-wing with the newly acquired skills.
The painting phase was incredibly unnerving, I procrastinated around it for months. The originals are gorgeous, their look, achieved with delicate layers of mist coats, is very difficult to replicate. I knew I couldn’t do it. My Y-wing is an amalgamation of all the Y-wings, it couldn’t be painted as any one of them anyway. I needed it to be a “Gold X”. I used the then newly released Archive-X enamel paints. The Archive-X product line is a remarkable resource for anyone building old Star Wars models. They have only acrylics available today.
So, the colours were right even if the paint scheme was going to be my own. I was so nervous that I wouldn’t succeed in painting the model quite like I had hoped. And sure enough, I made mistakes and the layers of paint grew thickness and developed grain. It was not as good as it could have been. The paint looks nice from afar but in close inspection it leaves room for improvement in some areas. I have planned to partially repaint the model, just the head and the engine nacelles, to give it some of the qualities I feel it’s lacking. Maybe some day.
The irony is that I love the big and beautiful Y-wing model despite the shortcomings with the paint, It looks amazing to the naked eye, I just don’t seem to like photographing it very much. That was the real surprise with this model, I have taken just a few photographs of it.
For this blog post I decided to take some studio photographs of the model as it is. I realised I had not really done even that before.
The landing gear installed. The twist in this was that the engines aren’t level, one sits a little bit higher than the other. The landing gear are therefore different height to keep the wing and body levelled when parked.Side views of the Y-wing I built. I can not look at it without thinking where this and that part belongs to originally. I do not know nearly all of them but I know many. The belly. Please note how the locations of the landing gear are concealed. There was no point trying to make them visible in this configuration. There are no landing gear bay doors in the filming miniatures, no need to create any such thing for this either, this thing needed to look like the real deal.
The thing is that my Y-wing is a relic of a bygone era. I built it the old fashioned way while watching 3D printing evolve from the crude early Shapeways products to what it is today; a new medium with affordable home printers with quality indistinguishable form plastic injection mold items. There will be those who still do this by hand but many have already moved to printing. Especially those who think of doing this commercially. While it is sad in some ways, it is also the beginning of a new, glorious era of modelmaking. I hope I have it in me to find a way to make use of it myself.
Back in 2011 I had already had some media exposure with my Lego and action figure photographs and I figured it was time to resurrect my teenage idea of photographing scale model spaceships. I had taken a few photos and tried to build some models of my own in the early 1980’s but it didn’t go nowhere. Then again in the early 1990’s, still no go. I looked up what was available this time around and found the Finemolds 1/72nd scale Y-wing.
The Y-wing was at the time my favourite of the classic Star Wars spaceships, probably still is, and I’d never had one before in any form, except the one I built from Lego when I was a kid, so the choice was easy to make.
The scale modeling scene had changed since my youth and the availability of tools and materials was now so much better. One of these new things was the Tamiya ultra thin liquid cement. The minuscule plastic bits and bobs were easy to glue on to the model with it. Also the camera technology had changed. I now had my first DSLR camera and I knew a little bit about Photoshop. So, all this seemed like a perfect setup for what I was about to do.
The 1/72 scale Finemolds Y-wing scale model. This one didn't have anything extra, it's a straight out of the box build.
I was so pleased with the Y-wing model, it turned out looking great. Furthermore, despite the small size it worked much better with the camera than I had hoped for. I made some tests and posted the first photograph of the model on Flickr. There was great potential in the idea, I thought.
A variation of the header image, a leftover from the same photo session.The coldest days of that winter photographing the Y-wing. Almost lost some toes, and that’s only half joking.
As it turned out, I was right about the potential but not quite the way I had hoped for. Being new to the toyphotography scene, I was not that familiar with what was already out there. I was shocked to find Cédric Delsaux’s fantastic Dark Lens book. He had already cleaned the table with it and I’d had no idea of it even existing.
I value the originality of ideas and I wowed myself to not proceed any further with scale models because of Dark Lens. Really, this was such a disheartening moment because the last thing I wanted was to come across as a copycat.
But, you know how it is, days went by, I took some more photos of the tiny Y-wing and I loved it regardless of the circumstances. I changed my mind and ordered the 1/72 scale Finemolds Millennium Falcon while making even more photographs with the small Y-wing. I figured by making the models myself, customizing them with lighting and more I might be able to find a way to do this my way after all.
Not all the images I have taken of the Finemolds model is about the Y-wing being parked somewhere. They just work well, I think.
There are only two photogalleries on this website, The Scale Model Project and Danish Plastic, both clear in what they’re about. There is more diversity in my photographs than meet the criteria for the two galleries however. Some photographs have been left out.
It occurred to me to shed some light on these choices now that this website is live.
I haven’t photographed action figures nearly enough to make a gallery solely of them. Nor black and white images, there are just a few of them.
The Alien Xenomorph action figure. The quality leaves much to improve but it looks great.
There are also studio photographs of the scale models I’ve built, just documentation of how they actually look like. This material would be fairly easy to expand a little, build volume. But perhaps this would be a bit catalogue-ish to make an entire gallery of.
A TIE Fighter built from a Hasbro toy. Today there is a really good 1/32 scale model kit available but at the time I built this (2020) there were only very small models around. Too small for me.
There are also the posters I do from time to time but, again, not enough. They’re certainly worth a lengthy blog post of their own later.
Putting these all together to make one “Miscellaneous” gallery would create a restless mishmash of this and that, just what I tried to avoid with this whole thing. So, two galleries it is, clean and simple, prioritized. I won’t rule out that some day a third gallery might show up though. If I figure one out.
