Cary Norton, Builder of Yesterday

Thursday March 31st, 2011

As you can observe in this retro advertisement, Legos have an incredible capacity to traverse time. The precocious visionary pictured has used his Legos to fashion a kind of futuristic communication device, startling and confusing his parents.

Cary Norton is also a visionary. We are sure that many people in his home base of Birmingham, Alabama are just as confused. But that’s because he has taken advantage of a fanatical devotion to Legos and photography, to build a camera few would have thought possible: a Lego camera. Before I continue, let me share with you an image of this beauty, posted on Cary’s blog:

Just as impressive is Cary’s documentation of his process. You can see several pictures of the different stages on his blog, and he explains his approach:

I started with trying to use the LEGO builder App on the computer to spec it out before I built it, but my mind wouldn’t work like that, so I borrowed a metric tonne of LEGOs from my friend Gregory. I made a couple of rounds of prototypes that proved to work well enough for my mind to think Hello World / proof of concept. Fast forward a bit and I got really busy and left the project sitting on a desk for just ages. A big hitch in the progress, other than being busy, was that I’d built just enough of the camera to realize I had to rebuild the main body to accomodate the film holder—a part I’d forgotten to plan for.

Fast forward something like a year, and I finally carved out time to restructure everything to fit the back and actually finish the super-low-budget “ground glass”. This weekend marked the first time all the pieces came together! I took 4 frames on Sunday, two Monday, and processed them later that day. I got to scan them this morning and I am COMPLETELY FREAKING STOKED.

So are we, Cary, So are we. Here are some examples of the pictures taken with the camera, which Cary dubs the Legotron:

This camera is a Mark I. But Cary has his sights set on a more advanced project.

I have plans for the next version already. I have a lot more knowledge now and can probably design more accurately in the LEGO App. I’m also going to do a lot of measuring to make sure I have a better focus range (on this version, I just started building on a whim). I’m sure lots of other little tweaks will find their way into the Mark II, but for now, I’ve got to shoot this guy as much as I can! I’m working on a cohesive project theme to shoot around. I’m open to suggestions too.

-Asad