Jeff Friesen is leading a double life. For three quarters of the year, he is an award-winning fine art photographer, capturing stunning shots, often in the great outdoors of his native Canada, that have garnered worldwide acclaim and numerous awards. On summer afternoons, however, Jeff becomes “Ernie,” whimsical creator of humorous dioramas and Legoist extraordinaire.The now viral 50 States of Lego started as a pet project for Friesen and his daughter, who would spend long afternoons building scenes with her Legos and other toys and then shooting them in a mini studio. The photographer dove head first into the project, first with a series satirizing the provinces of Canada and then with these United States, caricatured in little plastic blocks. The resulting vignettes are whimsical and smart, wittily captioned and rich in vibrant color and detail. Friesen talks to Resource this week about how it all started, and what a world-renowned photographer has to learn from a toddler.How did this project start?
Which came first, the Legos or the mini photo studio?Every summer I look after my daughter in the afternoon. To keep us amused I set up a little tabletop studio (of the white tent variety) that we use to take pictures of her toys. This past summer she was into Lego so we made Lego dioramas. I started making Lego scenes of all the Canadian provinces as a joke for my friends. Because there are only ten provinces the fun ran out too soon, so I pondered whether it would be possible to make Lego scenes for all fifty States. It seemed almost impossible given the limits of my daughter’s Lego collection.How does your daughter inspire you?Unlike many adult Lego builders, my daughter works with Lego free from dogma. She has even used a rubber band to hold pieces together. It inspires me not to get too rigid in my ways.As a Canadian, how much of this project came from knowledge you already had, and how much had to be researched?I lived in the US for two years, and over the last twenty years I’ve visited most of the states.
For states I’ve never been to I did research using Google.How many of the states represented here have you been to? What do you think the residents would think of their Lego likenesses?I’ve been to thirty-six states. Residents of states are overwhelmingly happy about their Lego likeness. It gives people a laugh, and that is the work’s goal. There are some people who think I didn’t capture every important aspect of their state, but that is of course impossible to do in one picture, Lego or not.Do you have a favorite diorama? What do you think makes for a good Lego vignette, as it were?I don’t have a favorite; in fact, they are designed to look nice as a complete set. Consistency is important to all of my work. Humor is an important element to Lego vignettes, and the ability to get a story across in one scene.With these dioramas, how much is done in camera and how much is Photoshop?The only major Photoshop work is removing the strings that hold up flying objects, such as those in the Kansas scene.
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Remember that old commercial about "Zack, the Lego maniac"? Well, Zack ain't got nothing on Andrew Carol. When Carol's not working on improving the finer points of OS X as a software engineer at Apple, he's hard at work building analog computers — like the Babbage difference engine — entirely out of Legos. Recently, Carol has completed his biggest challenge yet: a working Lego replica of the famous Antikythera Mechanism, created by ancient Greeks in 100 B.C. as a way of predicting astronomical events like eclipses. Though pictures of Carol's device have surfaced before, few people have delved into how it functions. Working with Digital Science, I directed a short film about the device using stop-motion animation to explain how it works — and talked to Andy about his design process. Why did you choose the Antikythera Mechanism, and where did you start? that got me thinking about this. Over Christmas of 2009, I was already working on a Lego machine that plays tic-tac-toe mechanically.
But Adam had seen my difference engine and contacted me, wondering if it would be plausible to build an Antikythera Mechanism out of Lego instead. That got me thinking it over and researching it. I had a crude prototype a week later, and a decent prototype two or three weeks after that. My proof of concept was just these little boxes of Lego gears I built all in a row. One box did one bit of math with an axle that ran to the next box. It just went from box to box in a straight line and proved that it was plausible. The original Mechanism and your model use physical gears to perform mathematical calculations. How does that work?it's all about ratios between the numbers of teeth on two gears meshed together. If one gear has 50 teeth and another has 25, that's a 2-to-1 ratio — which means that turning the axle one full revolution on the first gear will multiply by two, because it turns the second gear twice as fast. But the tradeoff is that when you make it go fast, you lose power.
It's fast, but it's not strong, and vice versa — and those mechanical effects pile up quickly when you've got over 100 gears working together in exotic ratios. When I have to multiply by 127, it's got to turn very fast, but with little power, which means that whatever amount of friction there is, I've effectively multiplied it by 127. So I had to put a lot of thought into designing the optimal layout of gears that would minimize the friction enough to make that kind of calculation physically work. The original Mechanism was made out of metal, but you had to work with plastic toys. How did that affect your design? Regular Lego bricks are problematic because they constantly want to pop apart, so I had to use cross-bracing to keep everything rigid enough to withstand all the mechanical force. And unlike my previous machines which were made from classic bricks, the new machine is purely made from Lego Technic pieces because the gearing is so complicated. I also designed it using a modular system with racks of gears that I could remove or pop back in easily.
For example, I made one module that does nothing but divide by 19. It makes the design problem smaller: all I have to do is focus on getting each module right, then figure out the next one. The hardest part was physically linking the output of one module to the input of the next; sometimes the output of one bit was physically far away from the input of the next one. But modularity really was the secret to making it all work. The original Mechanism was also quite a bit smaller than your version, and used about half as many gears. Why did yours end up being bigger and more complicated? The Greek guy who made the original could cut his own metal gears to the exact ratios he needed, so he only needed 50 or 60 gears total and could fit them together very compactly. But I have to use the gears and ratios that Lego happens to make. That's why I might need eight gears to accomplish a bit of math that the original machine accomplished with two. My machine uses about 110 gears, and 7 complete differentials, to do most of what the original one did.
But their calendar and ours are completely incompatible, so I also had to add complexity to make the eclipse predictions understandable. My machine has two extra indicators: one for the decade and one for the year. That way, as you turn the crank on the machine, you can read the dials and say "OK, a solar eclipse will happen in April of 2024." Is it really accurate to call the Mechanism a "computer"? Yes, but in a slightly different way than we're used to using that word. It's an analog computer, which means it can't execute programs. But the word "computer" used to be the name given to people who could do tedious math. In the 19th century there were rooms of people called "computers" who were skilled at arithmetic, supervised by a mathematician, who would create tables at great expense that navigators and sailors would use. But when we finally had mechanical devices that could do similar things, they got that name: computer. But analog computers were still very useful up through the 1940s.
World War II battleships would have a mechanical computer in their artillery, so that when you wanted to fire, you'd turn cranks to figure out how many times is this gun to be fired, how far is the other ship, what's the wind velocity, that sort of thing. And when you turned all the cranks, the gear ratios would tell you how to adjust your aim. So the Antikythera Mechanism, and my Lego version, are both just simple mechanical computers: you turn the crank at one speed and all the wheels move at a another speed, which you've calibrated to have a particular meaning — in this case, predicting the cycles of astronomical bodies. So you're saying the ancient Greeks had technology equivalent to what we were using in 20th-century battleships? We don't give people credit for how smart they were 2000 years ago. There were other mechanical devices as well, that we know about because they've been referenced in ancient books. They even had machines to dispense holy water in temples: you'd put a coin in a box and it would move a series of levers to dole out an amount of water to you, just like a vending machine.