Danish designer Milan Madge recently built himself a gigantic Leica III rangefinder camera out of LEGO blocks. The level of detail is impressive.





Here’s a photo of what the Leica IIIa looks like in real life:

“I’ve always loved the Barnack screw mount Leicas,” Madge tells PetaPixel. “I own a couple of Leica IIIs, they are my go-to cameras for most things.”

A few years ago, Madge made a 1:1 scale model of a Leica III as a joke, but he wasn’t happy with the level of detail. More recently he and some friends began building giant LEGO models of everyday objects, so he decided to revisit his Leica build.

“It seemed natural that the next thing I should build is a massive Leica,” Madge says.

“Cameras are a pretty interesting thing to build in LEGO,” Madge continues. “They are mainly lots of concentric circles, and LEGO bricks are anything but that. So it’s a great challenge, there’s a fair bit of maths involved.

“The hardest part for sure was the lens. Matching the radii and getting the LEGO bricks to line up whilst still staying in the LEGO System and making the thing strong enough to be handled was tough.”

“I thought the most important thing in this model was to ensure that there were no LEGO studs in the lens, that’s what dictated the scale, the element used there,” Madge says. “The part I’m not so happy about is that changing lenses doesn’t work perfectly at the moment. I’m working on a few solutions to make the screw mount.”

With this Leica III build out of the way, Madge has already started working on his next enormous LEGO camera model. You can follow along with his builds on Flickr.

(via Milan CMadge via Leica Rumors)