"I appreciated them so much. Each one was a treasure," she said. Now, parents are overwhelmed with choices, not to mention the cost of buying every flavor of the month. Furman cited a British study that said the average Western kid has 238 toys, but plays with only 12 on a daily basis. For Furman and her business partner Ranan Lachman, that dilemma sparked an idea. Just as consumers have taken to short-term rentals for everything from autos (Zipcar) to apartments (Airbnb), why not try something similar for toys? So last May, they launched Pley, which works something like Netflix (NFLX), only with Lego building-block sets. Pley's 15,000 subscribers can choose one or more sets from the company's online "pleylist." Pley ships the toys, and when kids tire of them (usually within two weeks) parents ship them back and get a new set in return. (Pley sanitizes each set before mailing it out.) The company started with just 34 Lego sets, purchased with some of the $500,000 Langan put up as seed capital.
Pley now has 23 employees and its San Jose warehouse stocks about 50,000 sets. Pley charges $15, $25, or $39 a month, depending on which sets parents want to rent. It's much cheaper than buying Lego sets, which can cost between $40 and $400. Although subscriptions for multiple months are available at a discount, most of Pley's customers sign up for just one month at a time. Star Wars sets are the hottest, as are Pley's own Creativity Crates, made up of combinations that are "designed to encourage creativity," Furman said. So far, Pley has shipped about 80,000 sets, and investors evidently expect that number to grow fast. In March, the company, which turned profitable last fall, raised $6.75 million in venture capital. To keep track of the many tiny blocks, they developed a high-tech weighing system that can tell within one-one-hundredth of a gram whether a set of blocks is complete or is missing a piece or two. (But no worries if there are a few lost pieces. There's no penalty for 10 to 15 missing blocks, which Pley counts as normal wear and tear.)
If all that sounds hard to imitate, it is: Furman and Lachman figured that by starting with a complicated toy that requires complex handling, they'd discourage potential competitors. Pley has no current plans to expand beyond Legos, but Furman said she'd eventually like to rent out other playthings that also encourage kids to use their imaginations. She's particularly drawn to toys like Goldie Blox, which teaches engineering to girls, and robot-making kits from Little Bits. "Parents are worried about their kids spending too much time in front of video screens," she said. "But [many of the educational toys] are expensive to buy, so they make sense to rent. It may take us some time to get there, but we always want to rent toys that encourage learning."Page Not Found (404) Sorry, what you're looking for can't be found! The page might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavaible. Or it probably just doesn't exist. Please participate in Meta and help us grow.
I find lot of fun shooting pictures of toys, especially Lego bricks. To light my scenes, I'm using one or more of those elements : Canon 430 EX II Small torch LEDs torch I like it but I would like to find a result more "realistic" and less plastic and colored. Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a website of a photographer who is, to my opinion, filled with talent... I'm looking for ways to improve my lighting and my overall composition. Is it necessary to have expensive equipment to do such stuff ? Can those results be obtained only by editing the pictures ? Tips on composition are outside of the scope of this site, as regards to lighting technique then that's bordering on too broad a question also, as the flickr account you link to contains many images with different lighting styles and techniques. Maybe you could pick out a single image that you want to emulate? The only thing I can say in general is that a lot of the images contain a volumetric component to the lighting, which is achieved by lighting through some cloud of particulates (smoke, dust, haze etc.)
I recall a comment from the photographer, Avanaut that the Hoth images were accomplished using reacted plaster of paris dust and an old fishtank full of water. The water helped suspend the dust for long enough to get a photograph.You can get by with DIY stuff for this type of work. The only thing I'd spend money on is a good tripod, preferably with a geared head so you can adjust the camera angle very accurately. You can pick up other supplies (lights, old fishtanks etc.) second hand pretty cheaply and they will do just fine. What you do need is experience and a lot of practice. I first became aware of Avanaut with the Hoth images, which were created in 2009, you can see a progression in the complexity of the lighting over the last 5 years, and you can imagine how many shots were taken and never posted to flickr over this period. Excluding the shots where models are superimposed over standard outdoor images, most of the work has to be done with the lights. Post production is not strictly necessary but adds that layer of polish, giving nice deep blacks, contrasty edges and rich hues to the coloured lighting queues.
That's a very broad question, so it's hard to give a specific answer. Decide what you want. It's great to just mess around sometimes and see what you get, but if you want to create consistently better images, work on creating the image in your head first. If you can do that, it will be much easier to figure out how to use what you have to create the image you want. Compare to traveling: it's sometimes fun to just wander, but it's far easier to get where you want to be when you know the destination from the start.Expensive equipment is nice to have and sometimes necessary, but one of the fun aspects of photography is that you can often improvise a way to get the light you need where you need it. That's especially true when you're working at small scales. Yes, some of the images you pointed to can only be created through compositing, etc., unless you're willing to build a full scale spaceship in you back yard. There's nothing inherently bad about that, though. Everything you do in "taking" a photo is really part of making an image.