This night after work I had the idea to shoot inside, and as I have an obscene amount of Legos I choose that. I started building a street corner that I could photograph. My idea was to shoot it with water pouring onto it to simulate it being in the rain.
I tried a lot of different angles. I put the baseplate up on an acrylic case I had in the shower. I tried shooting in on the bottom of the tub. At first my idea was to fill up a bucket of water, and pour it through a kitchen strainer to displace it through the holes. But it wasn’t enough water, and getting that timed up with the shot was difficult to say the least.
And different lenses. I tried to shoot it on the 150-600, from the door to the bathroom. I wanted to have to crop out as little as possible of the background. That didn’t work at all.
In the end I got it with a smaller acrylic case, my lights and camera set up around the tub. And just turning on the shower head and letting it run for a second to let the water really cover the whole Lego build. Then taking a bit of a long exposure so the water would be splashing. It doesn’t simulate rainfall anymore exactly, but I think it came out looking really cool.
I should also mention the lights, I put one for a front light so I wouldn’t lose the details. But the second one also had a blue gel on it, so I could get the transparent blocks to appear like windows, and I wanted a blue look to the shot.
Here’s a series of images for a look at the process. First one was before the water, just trying to get focus and what the lighting would look like.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1.0 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 100
Then we have when I tried shooting from the door. Turns out any movement at all, even all the way across the room is enough to jiggle the camera a little. And during a long exposure at such a zoomed in range. Well, you see what I mean.
Canon 5D Mark II w/Tamron 150-600mm @600 - 0.5 Sec - F6.3 - ISO 100
The next one was getting closer to what I wanted. But not quite there with the lights. I needed to shoot a lot brighter and tone it done in the edit.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/125 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 1000
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/80 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 1000
And that leaves us with the above image. Frozen water drops everywhere, lots of splashes. Still getting a bit of blue light, although to be fair most of that came back in the editing process. I cropped it a good bit to cut out the background of the tub parts.
In the end it was a fun little way to spend the evening. And I quite like the picture that came out of it.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @135 - 1/80 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 1000 - Same as above, just cropped and edited.