A photographer created a LEGO Porsche 917K at a mini Goodwood

Dominic has been photographing cars for magazines and websites around the world for almost 30 years, but suddenly without cars to photograph he (like a lot of us) found himself at a loose end. So he decided to replicate some iconic car images at home… using only the equally iconic Danish child’s building bricks.

His miniature masterworks include, most famously, the 917K at the start of its run up the Goodwood Hill, a shot Dom has taken many times for real. But how to capture the moment in little plastic bricks? Getting the correct Goodwood look, with the chequered start gantry, the hay bales and line of trees, was not so hard… achieving the essential sense of movement in the photograph was the tricky bit, as he explains.

“I had to apply skills I’ve learnt in my day job to create a way to take a car-to-car tracking shot. The blur comes from a slow shutter speed and a camera mounted on a tracking ‘car’ running ahead of the 917 – just as it would in life size. To ensure everything stayed in focus, I tied a piece of string between the 917 and the camera car so that the two were pulled along at exactly the same speed. Afterwards, I simply removed the makeshift tow-rope with editing software.” Simple as that then…

The lengths (and heights) Dominic has gone to to recreate the shots are well demonstrated by another in his series of pictures, which not surprisingly has become a hit on Instagram. This re-creates another iconic image: the airborne Porsche 930 Turbo. How to achieve such a sense of speed that the car appears to be flying through the air?

This picture, Dom tells us, involved a photo shoot in his garden where he could blur out the bushes to make a distant background, suspending the car above the ‘road’ by a piece of string, later Photoshopped out. But look carefully: like the original photo, there’s dust kicked up by the wheels.

“It’s these little details that aren’t easy to spot at first but they make all the difference in a realistic recreation,” says the photographer. Attention to detail like that is to the fore in another in the series, of the Porsche 919 Hybrid in the pits at Le Mans. Its convincing depth of field is achieved by “playing with focal lengths” and clever lighting (the sun peeking through is actually the beam from a torch).

What possessed him to do all this? “I had a house full of cameras that weren’t doing anything and I found it incredibly frustrating because all I wanted to do was create something. So I decided to re-create some of my favourite images from motoring history.”

There were upsides. Unlike a real photo shoot, there was no bad weather, traffic, technical problems or impatient drivers to deal with… And, as Dom says, “if anything, it’s helped my photography because I’ve really had to think about the technicalities of the shot. It’s been a more conceptual process than I’m used to with actual cars – in real life, you shoot much more in the moment.”

If you're getting creative with LEGO or any other toy car at home, and maybe you've built your own Festival of Speed in the living room, show us your creations on Twitter or Facebook!

If you like the mini 917K at the Festival, perhaps you’ll appreciate this model Goodwood Motor Circuit someone has built during lockdown?