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Photography Culture

The 50 States of Lego: A Photo Project Featuring Each State

Chris Gampat
No Comments
12/03/2013
2 Mins read

West_Virgina

All images by Jeff Friesen. Used with permission.

Jeff Friesen is a photographer that, like many others, found inspiration in LEGOs for a photo project. His 50 States of LEGO images is his latest creation and it may even be added to the number of awards that he’s already garnered. The project was spawned when working with his daughter and trying to work within the limits of her LEGO toys. The objective was to create a scene depicting something from each of the 50 states.

And quite a bit of set design went into it.

You can also follow the project on Twitter for more.

Phoblographer: What inspired you to create this project?

Missouri

Jeff: Every summer I look after my 7-year old daughter in the afternoon and we set up a little tabletop studio where we take pictures of her toys. I began making Lego depictions of the Canadian provinces for a laugh. There are only 10 provinces so the fun ended too soon. I used to live in the US and got to thinking it would be a challenge to do all 50 states…I actually thought it might be impossible, considering the limitations of my daughter’s Lego collection and the fact that there are 16 states I have not visited. It was also important to me that the jokes were fairly good-natured.

Phoblographer: A project like this would obviously require story boarding and more. Tell us a little bit about what went into the creation of the images.

Jeff: As for the process, I kept a list of all 50 states and kept adding ideas to them based on the limitations of my daughter’s Lego collection. For example, it would have been nice to build the St. Louis Arch for Missouri but I don’t have enough bricks to do it in a pleasing scale. I do have the bricks to build a raft, however, which led to the Tom and Huckleberry raft scene. Many times the bricks guided the work rather than my first ideas for a scene. The backgrounds are all cut up construction paper. It could have been all Lego but too many Lego studs can be distracting and the paper smoothed things out. Minimal photoshop work is done for color correction and minor special effects such as removing the string from “flying” objects.

Here are a couple more of the images.

West_Virgina

New_York

Missouri

Maine

Iowa

Illinois

Hawaii

Colorado

Alabama

 

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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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