Huge shout-out to my brother Phil for making this photo possible. When I was a kid my siblings and I used to watch the movie Jurassic Park constantly, and to this day we find ourselves quoting from various scenes in all manner of casual conversations. And so, when Phil was out shopping recently and stumbled across a LEGO set depicting the scene where Dennis Nedry gets attacked by a dilophosaurus, he picked up not one but three: one for himself, one for me, and another for our brother Tom. (Andy and Joanne didn’t like the movie as much as we did.) It took about a half hour for me to put the set together while my kids were playing Mario Kart and my wife was out with a friend, and after it was done the only thing left was to figure out how to photograph it :)
I had a rough idea in mind that ended up fairly close to what you see here, but my first attempt was way off the mark. I knew I wanted the primary subject to be Nedry, but also have the dinosaur, Jeep, sign, and even the Barbasol can visible as well. (It’s a super detailed LEGO set!) I also knew the key to the whole scene would be placement as well as lighting, and it wasn’t something I wanted to approach lightly. I tried a quick test on our dining room table and the results were…not great.
I mean, where to even start? There’s no clear subject, the frame is too jam-packed with stuff, the Jeep looms large and doesn’t even fit in the shot, the arrow is pointing off the side of the picture, and the lighting is horrendous. It’s dark, dull, and uninteresting. Clearly I needed a bit more time, and a little better lighting, and some more space to really create a compelling scene. I don’t meant to be overly critical here, but I knew I could do better than this. So, a few days later I set up the following scene:
The two most important things to consider for composing the image were the position of each LEGO, and the lighting. I put Nedry close to the camera because I wanted him to be the primary focus of the viewer’s attention. Then I put the dinosaur behind and to the right, which makes it seem like it’s pretty close to Nedry even though it’s actually not. I had to do this because of the size of each figure: The dinosaur is much taller and larger than Nedry, and it just didn’t look right when they were positioned close to each other. I put the flora/dock/barbasol set between the two figures but much farther back, and deliberately placed it so that you could see the East Dock sign (though the wording isn’t perhaps as clear as it could be, if you know the scene from the movie, you know what’s going on.) Way in the back went the Jeep because, while it’s an important element of the scene in the movie, I didn’t want it to detract from the focus of the main elements of this image–Nedry and the ill-tempered dinosaur. Instead I wanted the Jeep to serve as a bit of added texture and scenery and in that regard I think it worked well. Finally, the last thing I wanted to include was some kind of flora to make it seem a bit like the Costa Rican jungle of the film and for that the solution was remarkably simple: a couple of fake houseplants we just happened to have sitting around as decorations.
As for the lighting, there’s a couple of things to note. First, the two white lights (one lying flat on the table and the other standing up just past the left edge of the frame) were dialed in to a color temperature that mimicked the light that might come from the moon or overhead security lights. I put a red light on the dilophosaurus to give it a sinister, imposing feel and two lights way in the back set to 2700K just to add a bit of subtle color to the background. I specifically placed the vertical white light so it added a bit of rim lighting to Nedry and the dinosaur, which also helped separate them from the rest of the scene and give the composition a more three-dimensional look.
Overall I’m extremely pleased with how this all turned out, and particularly grateful to Phil for buying the LEGO set for me. Thanks Phil! This was a fun project from start to finish, and I’m really happy with the final photograph.
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