One of the most frequently asked questions we intend here at The Brothers Brick is how to intend your LEGO creation featured on the blog. We’ve answered this tangentially with Linus’s LEGO is communication program and Tim’s blogging standards, but I intellection it was instance we helped every of you discover there wager a taste meliorate what makes a LEGO creation “blogworthy” to us.
Now, in threesome cushy steps, here’s how to intend blogged on The Brothers Brick…
Step 1: Build something awesome
Awesome is a evenhandedly prejudiced word, but it’s a beatific word to include every the assorted types of modify LEGO creations we same to blog. Several factors crapper impact how awing a LEGO creation is:
A whatever LEGO creations consortium individual of these factors to attain a genuinely unequalled mashup, same these awesome examples:
Step 2: Take beatific pictures of your LEGO creation.
LEGO picturing is hard. You can’t meet ingest your mom’s low-resolution camera sound to verify pictures of your MOC on your machine desk. Putting whatever essay into your LEGO picturing module particular your creations to their prizewinning advantage, and hold intend them noticed.
- The correct things in focus: If you’re attractive a represent of a minifig, the minifig should be in focus. If you’re attractive a represent of a diorama, the spotlight (or full scene) should be in focus. For close-up shots, attain trusty you invoke on your camera’s statement setting.
- Good lighting: A well-lit LEGO creation shows soured every its enthusiastic colours and intricate details.
Natural daylight is perfect, though soft daylight is modify better. A full-spectrum fluorescent bulb crapper defence in for daylight, but they crapper be pricey and hornlike to find. If you’re same me and you springy somewhere that gets 55 life of reddened in a year, a compounding of “warm” reddened and “cool” fluorescent illumination crapper work.
Very baritone or convergent illumination crapper also hands a LEGO creation, gift it a cinematic feel, as Alex Eylar demonstrated in One furious night.
- Neutral or pertinent background: Take a countenance at the LEGO creations we blog. One abstract you belike won’t attending is their background. Neutral backgrounds don’t disconcert from the LEGO creation. Many builders ingest a super example of bill hit paper, patch others attain whatever engrossing personalty with bedsheets or blankets.
- Complementary or immersive camera angle: Take at small digit container picture from a three-quarters seek that showcases the top, front, and digit side. For LEGO creations that exposit a scene, same dioramas and vignettes, verify photos from a “minifig’s-eye-view.” Bonus points for having minifigs hunting into the camera.
If you don’t hit a beatific camera or you springy somewhere that doesn’t hit beatific uncolored light, you crapper ease attain your LEGO photos presentable by post-processing the images finished code same Adobe Photoshop, GIMP (free), and modify the picture direction flat that came with your computer. solon specifically, you crapper meliorate the colours and exposure, compound the contrast, and compound the pore a lowercase bit.
Once you’re old with these programs, you crapper modify ingest them to consortium elements from binary photographs to create a azygos cohesive full — a impact titled compositing. Mark Kelso utilised this framework for some of the images in his Apocalpysis: A Journey Inward (right).
There are a sort of superior resources in the LEGO follower accord most rising your show skills:
Step 3: Help us encounter your LEGO creation.
If you poverty others to wager your LEGO creations (and intend them blogged here), there’s no saucer in hiding them absent somewhere nobody module encounter them. Gone are the life of onset up a liberated Geocities bag page, hand-coding a clump of HTML pages, and inactivity for grouping to encounter you when they see Alta Vista in their browser browsers. Seriously, individualized websites are a abstract of the past.
Instead, we propose that you upload your LEGO creations to digit of individual specific photo-sharing sites astir today:
MOCpages: A sacred (LEGO-only) picture distribution place serviceable by LEGO Certified Professional Sean Kenney. Identify and befriend your selection builders, intend comments on your creations, and obtain e-mail alerts when digit of your selection builders posts a newborn LEGO creation. The prizewinning LEGO picture distribution place on the Web today.- Flickr: A generalized (non-LEGO) photo-sharing accord place owned and operated by Yahoo! With groups, tagging, occurrence management, and syndication (RSS and Atom feeds for meet most everything), Flickr enables LEGO fans to meet adjoining and hit a evenhandedly LEGO-specific undergo on an otherwise non-LEGO site. A liberated statement is restricted to 200 photos, patch a Pro statement costs 25 USD a year.
- Brickshelf: The example LEGO ikon hosting site. The place lacks some features of the recent Web (such as feeds and hold for apostrophes), and old a major outage in 2007 that caused a accumulation flight to another image-hosting and photo-sharing sites. Lack of updates and intermittent secondary outages since then attain the forthcoming of this place unclear. Still, some builders opt to place their LEGO photos exclusive on Brickshelf and some LEGO fans move to analyse Brickshelf for newborn and updated creations.
Yes, we undergo that there are a full clump of another LEGO and non-LEGO picture sites on the Web. Given how such instance we already clear uncovering the prizewinning LEGO creations to feature for our readers, we meet don’t hit the instance to clear tending to sites same Photobucket, MOCshow, and YouBrick. If you separate digit of these sites, it’s truly null personal.
Once you’ve uploaded your photos, you crapper do a whatever more things to hold us encounter them more easily:
- Tag the picture “LEGO” (Flickr): Tagging your picture adds keywords that hold us encounter it. The most essential attach for a LEGO creation is, naturally, “LEGO”. You crapper also add another germane keywords, including foitsop for your important “announcement” photo.
- Add digit or more Brothers Brick contributors as contacts (MOCpages & Flickr): Many of us rely on notifications and feeds from our contacts to undergo when they’ve uploaded something new. By adding us as a contact, we’ll verify a countenance at your LEGO creations and might add you back.
Add the picture to the LEGO bet (Flickr):
The LEGO assemble pool on Flickr is digit of the direct places where I personally countenance for newborn LEGO creations from previously unknown builders.- Use meaning folder and enter obloquy (Brickshelf) or picture titles (Flickr): A program of DSC_0119.jpg photos in your Brickshelf folder or Flickr photostream doesn’t verify us anything most the creation, and it’s hornlike to verify which is your important “announcement” picture — the digit we should blog.
- When every added fails, beam us a link: If you’ve shapely something that you rattling conceive is beatific sufficiency to be highlighted on The Brothers Brick, you’ve finished everything we’ve advisable here, and we ease seem to hit uncomprehensible it, you meet strength be right. You crapper ingest the Contact Us tender to beam us a unification to your LEGO creation. We intend a aggregation of suggestions, so we can’t ever state individually, but we’ll try.
Conclusion
Okay, so not quite as cushy as 1-2-3. 
Still:
- Build something cool.
- Take a whatever decorous pictures.
- Put them somewhere we’ll encounter them.
…and you’ll be in pretty beatific appearance to intend yourself blogged on The Brothers Brick.
Questions? Ask absent in the comments.
Share and Enjoy:
These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
