Here be Spartans!

Awhile ago, I was playing Halo 3 with a friend of mine. We were having a 2 vs 2 battle on Citadel. After the fact I took a couple of screenshots from the battle, including this one which I named "Red vs Blue" (it appears on my Bungie.net profile and in my file share under that same name). I thought it turned out extremely well and have been quite proud of this shot since I took it (it's one of my favourites).

A few weeks ago, I came up with the idea to try recreating it with Lego minifigs. This meant that I had to buy some more Spartan armour from Brick Forge, but that was okay with me (I've had my red Spartan for awhile now, but without other Spartans, it seemed a bit hard to come up with good picture ideas).

Besides the Spartans, I needed a few other things. First was the guns used in this shot. For the red spartan, I ended up using an assault rifle which I also acquired around the time I bought the new Spartans. For the Brute Shot, I ended up going with the Mega Bloks Brute Shot from one of their Covenant battle packs (I really don't like the Meha Bloks, but the Grunt looks kind of cool, and hilariously the weapons fit in my minifigs' hands).

But the bigger problem was what to use for the bubble shield. After thinking about it for quite awhile, I hit on what I thought was the perfect solution: gold cellophane (basket wrap). The first problem with that was finding gold. Eventually I found some yellow, which I thought would work. But then I ran into a lot of problems trying to take the actual picture. The cellophane reflects light and colours back, so I had a hard time getting a good shot of the blue spartan. Originally I put a piece of cellophane between the two spartans, but nothing looked right. Eventually I hit on the idea to cut a few holes in the cellophane and have the blue spartan coming through the bubble shield, which is what's happening in the original. Once I came up with that idea, everything was a lot easier, although it still took several shots before I got something I was happy with.

All in all, this shot took a lot longer to take than I planned. It took at least 1.5 hours, during which I took over 60 different shots trying to make it look just right. I realize that the Spartans aren't really lit like I wanted them to be (it was extremely hard to light them with the cellophane and with the light in the background) and I know that the bubble shield colour is wrong (bubble shields are usually gold, but in the original it looks silver). But overall I think it turned out alright.

This pic appears on my Flickr Photostream.

New Gallery: Lego Halo

It's been awhile since I made a new gallery. After finally posting pics of my three new Spartans, I decided to make a Lego Halo gallery. There are some really awesome Lego creations present on Flickr which are well worth checking out. As per my usual gallery building rules, I used only one picture per photographer. Some of the images were really hard to choose between (I accidentally had several shots from both Vengeance of Lego and mondayn00dle before finishing), but in the end I made a gallery that I think really showcases the Lego Halo creators of Flickr.

An Exciting Update

I know it's been awhile since I've posted here. School's been rather hectic and I haven't had a lot of time for photography. But over the last few weeks, I've had a few exciting things happen!

First of all, last year I found out the my picture, Giant Sunrise, was getting published. I finally received my copies of the book! Unfortunately, Giant Sunrise was published in black and white, so it doesn't look quite as good as the original, but I'm still extremely pleased. It appears in the book Creating Meaning: Reading and Writing for the Canadian Classroom.

The second exciting thing that happened is much more recent. Sometime over the last day I sold a print on Red Bubble! The print was for Wizard on Water (you may remember it from my post about the Cascades from early May). Thank you to whomever bought the print - you really made my day! :)