Star Wars and LEGO, two things you can’t go wrong with. In 2009, Finnish illustrator, designer, and photographer Vesa Lehtimäki began recreating scenes from Star Wars using LEGOs. Some of the scenes are based on actual scenes from the movie and others are he created himself. The lighting, focus, composition, and minute details in each photo is amazing.

“With my photography, I’m revisiting an unfulfilled career path, I guess. With the attached little stories my photos are like tiny one-frame movie scenes,” he says. “And I get to direct Star Wars!” [WIRED]

His setup:

The setup is simple really: All I use is an old transparent CD storage box, some water and my trusty old A4 lightbox for lighting. For the bottom of the box I have a piece of gray Lego baseplate cut in form and hot-glued on a piece of acrylic sheet to give it some weight. Legos float because of all the air trapped inside individual pieces.

Anything I want to shoot is then easily mounted on the baseplate and inserted inside the CD box.

Photographing “snow” in this scale is difficult, and to amp up the challenge I wanted it to fly around. The answer was not to use faster shutter speed but to slow the snow down.

I had a wacky idea to submerge everything in water, it slows down everything that moves. The water also causes light to reflect from solid surfaces in a way that sometimes helps hiding the miniature scale. This is an old concept I’ve been toying with for ages. For the snow I use ground plaster of Paris—reacted, not unused gypsum powder! It is a passive material that doesn’t stick to anything.

Lighting is done with the lightbox freehand as you can see from the photo below.

I shoot a lot of frames because the “snow” is impossible to control exactly. And then some Photoshopping is in order, but not always, sometimes none is needed. [GIZMODO]

Here are a some of my favorite photos from his series:

Make sure to check out his Facebook page and Flickr page, Avanaut.