LEGO RESPONSIVE// Photography

While I was back home recently I found a huge box of Lego out of the attic and bought it back to Leeds, the aim was to start building some Lego and re-imagine the fun I had in my design. However in the end I have chosen a different approach due to the aims set out in the brief, mainly that the target audience is in fact the parents of children and not the children themselves. At this stage I am looking to design a low cost poster series for buses and bus stops as well as some merchandising or point of sale advertisement. The idea, as I've gathered from the brief, is to get middle class parents remembering what it was like to play with Lego as a child and remind them how much fun they had, but also how much they learnt. The learning aspect of the posters should be as clear as the nostalgia. So my challenge is to produce some modern-retro posters aimed at middle class parents of children from the ages of 8 - 14. These people need to be reminded of the process of Lego in some way, but I do want the poster design to remain basic and 'Danish' in its design style. This will require an aspect of modernism and minimalism, to hark back to the days of Lego from the 60's, and 70's. 

To start I have taken about 60 photos of what I deem to be the most iconic bricks Lego have ever made. This is the standard 2x4 Red brick and the Yellow smiling head. Luckily I had both these bricks in the box. I took the photos in RAW format and then again in SHQ, what I want is to get a high enough quality photo to use straight on a scalable poster.

 I took the photos with my own SLR in a makeshift studio build out of desk lamps and a light box. Unfortunately you can really tell this is how it was done. A combination of poor lighting and a lens which wasn't powerful enough means I had to crop and change angles in an awkward way to get the best image. What I may have to do is take the pieces into uni and take some photos with a bigger camera, however any of the good equipment is notoriously hard to get, especially without induction.

 I have taken these images and put them into photoshop. The aim here was to bring out the plastic colour and finer details of the bricks. I need them to work on large posters and billboards as well as bus ads.

Both of the images came out at about 60% of what I wanted in reality. I will start to mock up some ideas with these images however I will probably have to come up with a more refined image over Christmas if I want these posters to really work. The first problem I have with these photographs is that the quality is a bit to low for what I want, what I need to know from the photography studio is whether I can realistically take a photo of such a small object at a high enough quality to really get these designs working. The second problem comes from the conditions of the Lego bricks themselves, many of which are approaching 20 years old. For example the Lego logo detail has rubbed off the red brick and I have had to touch up the eyes and mouth on the head. They both also suffer from really minor scratches and colourations most of which I have removed in photoshop however It would still be preferable to get some brand new equivalents.
On the positive side I can use these images to start putting together some preliminary ideas and poster designs and really mess about with the layout.