Hi All, One of my hobbies is building sets of Lego®.  I’ve been a fan ever since I was a little kid, and I’ve always been fond of putting together kits – the bigger, the better. As an adult, it’s a great time to be a fan of the brick, as more and more kits are released for the adult collector/builder.  In the 80s, the kits were for children and were not particularly detailed; these days there are scale models (e.g. the Eiffel Tower, London Tower Bridge, Taj Mahal) which only the advanced builder would attempt. I’ve amassed a rather deep collection of sets over the past ten years, and I plan to build new kits from time to time.  As I do, I’ll document the build process and write stories at a new web address, the Lego Republic.   Friends and fans are welcome to contribute too (get in touch and I’ll create an account for you)! See you at the new site.  /R

This article has moved to a new home at the Lego Republic.  Click on this link to go there now! This year, I was alerted to an annual Lego festival held in Canberra called BrickExpo.  Unfortunately, my plans changed and I was unable to get tickets. Notice: I’m beginning to build a new separate site for all things Lego.  Check out the Lego Republic (under construction) if you enjoy the way of the brick™! As a bit of a consolation, here are pictures from my own personal BrickExpo.  I’ve not got a lot of room to display fully constructed Lego kits, but I think I do a lot with the space I’ve got. The first set of pictures is of a series of modular “city block” style buildings.  There are also elements of the 50th anniversary kit, one of which is the theatre which you can see above.  I’ve also the Emerald Night (steam train) sitting at one of the new train stations. The little plastic inhabitants of the town are doing all those things one would do – celebrating a marriage, window shopping, taking out the trash.. or racing for a train..     Leaving Lego city behind, the next best stocked set of kits are by far Star Wars Lego kits.  This year Lego released new MiniFig display cases. As some of the Star Wars MiniFigs can be worth quite a lot (the Cloud City Boba Fett being worth a few hundred dollars), I’ve moved a sample of some into a set of display cases. Next, my collection of Star Wars Ultimate Collector kits – I have quite a few assembled at the moment.   In total the following are assembled: Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyer, Super Star Destroyer, Hoth Snowspeeder, TIE Interceptor, Vader’s TIE Advanced x1, AT-ST, Lambda Class Shuttle, and the Y-Wing Fighter -->

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Tonight we are able to observe Earth’s moon at the closest orbit for the year.  This happily coincides with Venus traversing the sun early in the morning (Sunday 6th of May).  The moon will be full around 1pm (13:35) today and rising at 5:15pm (17:15). Here are some wide and telephoto images I captured from right outside my house on a chilly Sunday morning of the waxing gibbous moon (98% full moon). Exposure: 1 second Focal Length: 11mm ISO: 400 F-stop: f/2.8 A beautiful shot from my Olympus 11-22mm ultra wide angle lens.  To capture the detail, I shot this at ISO-400 and an f-stop of f/2.8 at 11mm for 1 second with a focal length of 11mm. Exposure: 4 seconds                                 Exposure: 1/60 second Focal Length: 104mm                                Focal Length: 200mm ISO: 100                                                  ISO: 800 F-stop: f/8                                                F-stop: f/3.5 Next, a zoom shot at 104mm (above, left) and at 200mm (above, right) with an f-stop of f/8 (above, left) and an f-stop of f/3.5 (above, right) and an exposure of 4 seconds (above, left) and at 1/60 sec (above, right).  Obviously I didn’t have a realistic chance of getting a clear focus because of the cloud cover, but you do get to view the perfect symmetry of the moon, and the misty clouds don’t look half bad. Exposure: 4 seconds Focal Length: 11mm ISO: 100 F-stop: f/2.8 Reverting back to the 11-22mm lens, another shot this time with a 4 second exposure, ISO-100 and the same f-stop (f/2.8) and focal length (11mm).  The clouds seem a bit puffier and there appears to be a slight difference in sharpness.  I just threw this one in for comparison purposes. Here are two examples of using High Dynamic Range (HDR), post-processing tone mapping from the RAW format:   The first shot is using the default details enhancer, the second using a monochrome filter. I like how the left hand photo above (which is a tone mapped version of the first photo) almost looks liek it is set against blue sky – in the middle of the night! Here are some  photos of the full moon, taken earlier today (Monday 7/05/2012):   Exposure: 4 seconds                                Exposure: 1/1000 sec Focal Length: 11mm                                 Focal Length: 200mm ISO: 200                                                 ISO: 320 F-stop: f/2.8                                            F-stop: f/3.5 Under a wave of high sirrus or alto looking cloud, the moon shone through.  Once the majority of the cloud had (briefly) passed, I was able to shoot the moon itself using a 50-200mm f/2.8-f/3.5 telephoto lens. Earlier that evening, I’d been playing around with the moon in concert with the moonlight’s lens flare, to create some fairly dramatic composition. Exposure: 2 seconds                               Exposure: 1 sec Focal Length: 54mm                                Focal Length: 200mm ISO: 200                                                ISO: 100 F-stop: f/5                                              F-stop: f/5.6