Tutorial on making it rain in a Lego photo

August 23, 2020

Up until now I just could not figure out how to get rain in my images. I simply shopped it in…. it’s ok, but I always wanted the real thing! Then I read a comment written bij Anna (Fourbrickstall)- also remember to visit her VERY informative Youtube-channel if you want to know about Lighting and Lego-photography!) wherein she wrote something like that you simply need to keep your eyes open. When do you see rain on a wet evening; You see it in front of a lamppost! When there is no light… you can’t see light. So there you go; step one to get rain into your Lego-photo, you need to backlight the waterdrops!

Make it rain in a Lego photo

And that is what I did. I created a scene with the two monsters, backlit the scene (light B in figure 1), grabbed my water spray bottle and started spraying.

Nice! I saw some rain and light in the B-area of the photo…. but the rest was dark. I barely saw the monster in the back. To light the front of the scene, I added the C and D lights at the sides. That lit the C, D-areas and the monsters sufficiently. However, now it irritated me I only saw rain in the B-area. I also wanted rain in the A-area. That area was well lit by C, but from the side and not from the back. And back-light B was blocked by some trees. That’s why I finally added back-light A and voila…. rain in area A! Yay 😀

Light and camera settings

Another thing I completely ignored before were specific camera-settings. I have to admit; I feel a little stupid now because of this. Usually I don’t care about shutter speed in my Lego photography because my scenes mostly don’t have moving parts. However… rain is a moving element in these photos (DUH!). So shutter speed IS important and the shutter speed determines if you’ll see drops, strips or just a mist. With long shutter speeds I normally use I only saw a grey mist, and that was it. I needed to increase the shutter speed! That also meant I needed to have more light than usual to prevent the image from becoming way too dark. In the end my camera-settings were: 50mm macro lens, ISO400 f1/7,1 1/40s.

Flash-light

I always used continuous light, so I can’t say too much about flash lights. However, I will experiment with flash shortly. Remember that flashlight is usually more bright that continuous light AND it can freeze motion/ rain. Both these qualities influence the shutter speed and thus the exposure-triangle. Anyway, I’ll get back to you once I know a bit more!

The result

The resulting image “a rainy forest walk” is shown below. Thanks for reading and until next time!

brick photography - Monsters in the forest on a rainy night

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