Introducing the all new Flickr app. Share and connect with the Flickr Community. Stunning photos made easy. All your pictures in one place. Get the new Flickr AppUsmc LegoMilitary LegoMilitary BratMilitary OfficerUsmc DressDress UniformUniform LegoLego ThingyBrody DressForwardUSMC Dress Uniform - Perfect for the Lego Loving Military Brat in your life! This is not my design! Abh 1979Siara StationLego GreatestLego InspLego S SpaceSpace 1Lego ZoneLego BoardsMiniatures LegoForwardFrom "LEGO: Greatest. Board by ABH-1979 SiAra Station - Estoc on landing pad by Si-MOCs on Flickr:Lego My LegoFav LegoLego RobotLego MechaLego VignettesNice LegoAwsome LegoAmazing LegoSpacecraft MicroForwardScrolling it old school with Raptor: Call of the ShadowsBack in 2009, I wrote a lengthy post titled How to get featured on The Brothers Brick, in 3 easy steps. A lot has changed in 7 years, for both TBB itself and on the web more generally, and it’s time we shared how we go about finding and selecting what to highlight here on The Brothers Brick in 2016.
The “three easy steps” I outlined back then are still 100% true: But it’s worth revisiting what we expect in terms of presentation and “findability.” I’ll also cover what we consider newsworthy, in case you have an event you’d like us to feature or a hot tip you’d like to share. I won’t rehash what we think is cool. We have a diverse team of contributors from all over the world, and we all like different things — castles, steampunk, cars, architecture, airplanes, spaceships, Star Wars, mecha… Read the website every day to see for yourself. Suffice to say that if we think it’s interesting, we’ll happily feature it. Back in 2009, we mostly featured LEGO creations on plain white backgrounds — we ourselves jokingly called it the “Dorling Kindersley aesthetic.” A clean white background does indeed focus the viewer’s attention on the subject, and we certainly continue to feature plenty of well-photographed LEGO creations on the tried and true white background.
And it’s not hard — just get some inexpensive cardstock, set it up so that it curves up out of frame as a backdrop, and plonk your MOC in the middle. Moving away from the plain white background, don’t hesitate to get a bit creative. Here, I’ve used nothing but a single piece of brown cardstock. I’ve tried a complex light-box setup, but have since just fallen back to big pieces of paper with plenty of lights. Similarly, the photography itself and subsequent post-processing are not nearly as challenging as the process was back then. Back in 2009, LEGO photo albums on sites like Flickr were still cluttered with blurry photos taken on hand-me-down cellphones. These days, photos taken on an a recent iPhone, Nexus, or Galaxy are pretty indistinguishable from photos taken on older DSLR cameras. And whether you’re on a Mac or a PC, there are plenty of out-of-the-box and free tools, both for your computer and on websites, to help you with basic fixes like cropping, white balance, and exposure.
There’s really no excuse for posting a dark, orange-hued photo with your stupendous creation surrounded by huge expanses of dead space — you don’t need an expensive digital SLR camera or pricy software like Photoshop. All that said, making the effort to take high-resolution photos and post-processing them a bit does make a huge difference. Hannes Tscharner described the workflow he uses as a professional graphic designer with Photoshop in our interview about his Millennium Falcon. At the other end of the scale of technical aptitude, I recently described how I used just the Photos app on my Mac plus a couple of free photo effects sites to create my Knights of Ren scene from The Force Awakens. The whole photo editing process took barely 10 minutes. So, good pictures on a good background — easy enough. But we still see a lot of photos that don’t meet the bar, so here are a few things to avoid: In general, we try to find the LEGO creations we end up highlighting on our own.
Most of what we write about we find through the LEGO photo pool on Flickr. We also pore over dozens of other sources and we do check messages sent to us on our Facebook page and through our contact form, but if you want to be sure that our contributors see your LEGO creation, share it in the main group on Flickr. As with photography and presentation, there are a few things we’d ask builders to avoid: For better and for worse, all this makes it that much easier for you as a LEGO builder to ensure we see your LEGO creation — just put it in the LEGO photo pool on Flickr. If you’ve done that, trust us when we say that at least one of our 18 contributors will have seen it. As I promised we would in my 10th anniversary post last summer, we’ve made a number of substantive changes to improve TBB over the last six months. Among them, we’ve significantly increased our coverage of LEGO news and LEGO set reviews. As a result, we’ve covered a lot more news items on The Brothers Brick than we had in the prior couple of years.
We still have a ways to go, though, and we need your help. In addition to our own news hounds, we also rely on our readers, event organizers, and even our friends and counterparts who run other news sites for tips. If you see something LEGO-related that you think might be newsworthy, let us know by messaging us on Facebook or through our contact form. We hope this helps clarify how The Brothers Brick finds the LEGO models we feature, what we expect from builders in terms of presentation, and how we continue to work at improving our news coverage. Fire away in the comments!When I was a kid, LEGO didn’t have movie licenses. We only had “Space”, “Castle”, “Pirates”, and “City”, and we were damn glad to have them. Now there are all these fancy-shmancy movie tie-ins like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, and Lord of the Rings. But one LEGO licensed-property we’ll probably never see is Shaun of the Dead. For some bizarre reason, LEGO doesn’t make sets based on R-rated zombie movies, but these Shaun LEGO would be amazing.