I love long-exposure photography and have been capturing cityscapes at night for years. I’ve started playing around more with light writing and wanted to try it out with some toys. I recently got the LEGO Shadow set, and it seemed like a great model to experiment with.

For these photos, I used:

  • An off-camera Nikon flash with a snoot to direct light
  • 2 Lume Cubes for fill light
  • 50mm f2.8 macro lens
  • Nikon Z 6 II
  • Small red light
  • A mirror for the ground to create a reflection
  • Old circuit boards for the background
  • The LEGO Shadow the Hedgehog Escape set

For my camera settings, I tried a range of 5 to 10-second exposures and my sweet spot was 6 seconds which allowed me to write a bit more and keep the lines clean. After I captured a bunch of photos I loaded them all into Lightroom to look and when I was running through them all I realized this might be a cool little video too. So, I went back to my photo table and captured 24 frames of a bunch of scenes to create a little stop-motion video. It turned out better than I thought and I would love to add some motion to a character when I try this again with the Tron LEGO set next year.

If you have some light writing photos featuring toys we would love to see them over on our MeWe Toy Photographers group!

More Sonic The Hedgehog Toy Photography