Tamid Photo Essay in Lego® #1

The Shot

Greeting the Guards

The Memuneh, along with Yonasan the Levi, greet the guards stationed outside one of the Courtyard gates.

The Story

You are here

Every night, guards would be stationed throughout the Beis Hamikdash complex. These guards were not there to protect the building from thieves but rather to give it honor. The guards were posted in groups, allowing some members to rest while others stood at their post. The guard cohorts were mostly made of Leviim, as shown in the image above, although there were three locations that were guarded by Kohanim.

The Setup

This shot is modeled and rendered in Bricklink Studio with depth of field added in Photoshop (read more about this process in my introduction). The default light is turned off and all lighting is accomplished using various bricks in luminous colors. The fireplace and standing lamp are in Luminous Soft Amber, with an additional plate in the same color just above the minifigures to add more light. A plate in Luminous Soft Blue provides cool backlighting to contrast with the warm glow of the fire.

Studio will automatically attempt to attach bricks together while you are building, something that is extremely useful and mimics the process of building with plastic bricks. However, when the bricks do not naturally attach together, such as when placing minifigures freestyle onto a surface of tiles, it can be a little trickier since there is no such thing as gravity to allow the pieces to come to rest. That is why, in this setup shot, Yonasan appears to be hovering just above the floor.

Even though the default light intensity is set to zero in the scene, there seemed to always be some ambient light present in the final render (not sure why). I have found that placing large black baseplates around the model does a good job blocking "extra" light from the scene.

The two seated guard minifigs have their legs detached and placed in front of them for more natural seating poses. The stair railing posts bear a close resemblance to Yonasan in both size and shape, and I purposely positioned him further away from the Memuneh so that people have to look twice to figure out which of the two silhouettes is the kid and which is the column. This is a nod to what the Mesilas Yesharim writes in Zehirus that, in the darkness, "a person can appear like a pillar and a pillar like a person."

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