LEGO® Photo app for iPhone and iPad: The Ultimate Portfolio Solution

LEGO® Photo for iPhone and iPad. The ultimate creative way to show off your portfolio

As we read last week in Reuel Golden’s post about portfolio dos and don’ts, nothing beats the impact of showing your work in person to a prospective new client. However, coming up with a presentation that will wow art directors and photo buyers is a real challenge that all photographers face. You not only have to include your very best imagery, you have to display it with a method that has strong visual impact and, ideally, a sense of originality.

With so many portfolio options these days, it’s hard to choose the medium that has the right look, as well as a workable cost basis that fits your marketing budget. Do you go traditional and show your work as tear sheets in a cool black binder, or do you go iPad and show them digital reproductions of your work? There are obvious benefits and visual strategies to both, but what about something entirely different?

Enter LEGO® Photo for iPhone and iPad. It’s different. Way different. It’s also cool and totally retro, and something that just about any creative type can relate to. I mean, c’mon, who didn’t grow up playing with LEGOs®? Um,  no one that I know.

Once you download the app, which by the way is free, you simply take a photo, or upload a shot from your camera roll and wait a few seconds for the app to process your photo. Then you tap the screen and watch as your image is rendered as a virtual mosaic of colored LEGO® bricks.

If you don’t quite like how it looks, tap the screen again and watch as it’s rendered with a slightly different color scheme. Options seem to include cool tones, warm tones, and a number of different combinations that stem from the CMYK color palette. There’s even black and white. Upon review, the images do look a little, well, blocky. It helps to look at them from a few feet away. Try it, get out of your chair and stand a few steps back from your computer. There, see how good the shot below looks? Also, the app appears to work best with photos that are taken fairly close up against solid backgrounds, like snow or shadows.

When you’ve got something you like, you can save the shot to your camera roll and then include the image in your next iPad portfolio showing. However, that’s so two-dimensional and it completely misses the potential that lies within this incredible app.

Why not buy a set of LEGO® bricks and, using the shot as a blueprint, build a three dimensional LEGO® rendering of your photograph and show that to your client? Imagine the impact! It may take a bit of time, but with enough bricks and a good sized baseplate, you should be able to get it to look exactly like the shot on your iPhone.

You can build a 3D LEGO® rendering of your image

And why stop there, for about the same price as fancy promotional mailing, you could buy a few brick sets, make a handful of 3-D LEGO® versions of your best image, pop them in bubble wrap envelopes and mail them out to your best clients. Not only is it effective marketing, it gives them something to play with when they’re bored, not unlike the Veer Creative Activity Books.

I absolutely guarantee, this will get your work noticed.

LEGO® Photo for iPhone and iPad is available in the iTunes store. Basic LEGO® Basic Bricks building kits sell for $12.99, and green LEGO® Baseplates are available for $4.99 each.

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Dan Bailey is a professional outdoor photographer based in Anchorage, Alaska. See his non-LEGO® imagery and read more photography related ramblings on his blog at danbaileyphoto.com/blog.

Tagged as: freelance photographer, humor, Iphone, iPhone App, Lego, marketing, Photographer, Photography, Portfolio Advice