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Photographer recreates moon landing photos with LEGO and practical effects

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. On 20 July 1969 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong set their feet on the surface of the moon. And in 2019, many people have paid tribute to them in all sorts of ways. Hungarian photographer Lampert Benedek was one of these, and he did it in his recognizable fashion: with LEGO.

Lampert used the popular toy bricks to recreate the iconic photos of the Apollo 11 mission. He kindly shared his work with us, as well as some backstory. And since he used mainly practical effects, the BTS images are as fun as the finished ones.

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Photographer Felix Hernandez creates fantastic worlds by building small scale models

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Mexican photographer Felix Hernandez is known for his amazing photos of toys and miniatures that he builds himself. He relies mainly on practical effects and mixes them with some Photoshop, and we’ve shared lots of his photos here on DIYP. Felix combines his knowledge in photography, design and image manipulation with craftsmanship to create some mind-blowing work. Today, he has decided to tell us more about it: how he does it, where he finds inspiration, and what his work means to him. And of course, he kindly shared plenty of his beautiful images and BTS shots.

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Here’s how to combine practical effects with CGI in videos

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If you’re shooting videos, you can find both practical effects and CGI useful. But combining them can give you limitless creative possibilities. In this video, Liran Friedman of Artlist will show you how you can bring practical visual effects and CGI together and shoot an original and fun video.

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How to use practical effects to create explosions for toy photography

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When photographing toys, there are so many tricks that can make your scenes look lifelike and realistic. To add an extra kick to certain scenes, you might need to create mini-explosions, all of which can all be done with practical effects. In this video, Norm from Adam Savage’s Tested hosts toy photographer Johnny Wu. He guides you through his process for creating blast effects in his toy photography and shares some handy tips and tricks that you can use in your work.

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That insane car chase in Fast Five was shot using a real 9,000lb vault

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The Fast & Furious franchise is notorious for using CG in their movies. Even though they have very highly trained stunt drivers, and even gave the actors some rather intensive driving lessons, some things are just easier and safer when done with CG. But they also do a surprising amount of effects practically, when possible.

One sequence that seemed fairly obvious as CG in the imaginatively titled fifth instalment of the series, Fast Five, sees our heroes dragging a 9,000lb vault containing $100 million through the streets of Rio De Janeiro (although it was actually filmed in Puerto Rico). Except, it wasn’t CG, it was shot for real, with a real 9,000lb vault.

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These fast cars photos are actually made with toy cars and practical effects

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You may remember Hungarian photographer Lampert Benedek and his fun LEGO photo series. While heavy snow is covering my hometown, I noticed Lampert’s image of a car caught in a snow blizzard. But seeing a BTS image made me realize: it’s not really a car, and it’s not even real snow!

Lampert makes some awesome photos of fast cars, but he uses toys, practical effects, and some clever ideas to make them look real. I chatted with him a bit about how he does it, and he shares some tricks for making these images.

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An artist created this spooky pumpkin photo using practical effects and lighting

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Halloween is a holiday that can spark our creativity in different areas: decorating the home, carving pumpkins, or creating costumes. And of course, it sparks imagination in photographers as well.

Inspired by Halloween, Felix Hernandez has created a spooky photo of pumpkin on fire that looks like it just got out of a horror movie. As always, he used practical effects, lighting, and patience to achieve all the effects he wanted, and he kindly shares with DIYP some details about this spooky shot.

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See how Apple used real fire and practical effects for new Apple Watch faces

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Regular as clockwork, every year, Apple announces their new products and mobile operating system updates. And that includes their line of watches. The new WatchOS 5 comes with new dynamic faces. Designed to work with the Apple Watch Series 4, these new faces are not CG as we might first think. They were actually made using practical effects.

The new faces include Fire & Water, Vapour and Liquid Metal. They can be configured in numerous ways, and animate when you raise your arm to look at your watch. Cool Hunting posted this minute-long video to show how they were made and we see some pretty cool techniques.

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How to make 3 great practical effects for your videos

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Filmmaker Daniel DeArco is big fan of DIY. If you follow his social media, you’ll see that he comes up with all kinds of self-built solutions to overcome the challenges he faces in his productions. Not all of these projects are to solve a technical problem, though. Sometimes it’s for visual effect. And in this video, he talks about three of the practical effects he made for a recent video.

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