#Makeitrain photoshoot

Blog posts and I are some what a long term relationship, I often forget or just don’t find the time to write them out. So here is one of my #makeitrain shoot.

I’ve been incredibly busy over the last few months, had various wedding to attend and photograph, as well as plenty of time out the country doing my day job and also shooting multiple fitness shoots.

Oh, and I bought and moved into a house with my Fiancè. 🙂

A long time ago I saw these incredible photographs where a photographer froze the rain whilst shooting portraits of people to go into a company gym.

I was glued to the video and thought I need to have a go myself.

I advertised the #Makeitrain shoot online and I have to say the feedback has been phenomenal.

For any photographers or people that are interested to know, here is how I set up the shoot

I’ll start off with the back lights. There is a lot of reasons why I have to use this set up in this way, other photographers may pick another set up, but this is how I did it. So the rear two lights are 2 x Lencarta Superfast High-Speed 400w Flashes, the reason behind using these being where they are is that you need to back light rain in order to photograph it cleanly. Also, I wanted to use them as an edge light for the model. I used the strip softbox previously to light the model but I found I needed extra lights to capture the rain, so using the standard reflector and angling them towards the model, meant they do two jobs in one.

1st question, could you use normal flash guns and not the Superfast’s??

Yes and no..

If you want to completely freeze the rain then you need the fastest flash duration out of the flash. The faster the duration the less the rain drop is allowed to move whilst being lit by the flash in the image.

Depending on your style of image, you could use a standard flash and maybe not concentrate on capturing the rain, maybe blur it with a lower aperture or just allow the movement in the rain..

Here is an example without Superfast flashes..

Notice how the rain drops are all long and lack any real detail, due to the speed the rain is falling at, it means that with a longer flash duration you capture more of the movement in the shot.

Here is a shot with the 2 superfast flash guns in place..

Notice how much sharper the rain droplets are compared to the previous shots.

For the Key light, I used 1 x Atom 360 Flash with a High-Intensity reflector on it. Reason for using this set-up is the Atom has a faster flash duration than any of my other battery based flashes. Also it’s light and easy to manipulate to a good position, using it with the High-intensity reflector means I get an extra stop of light out of the flash, even though I was using it at full power, It gave me the shadow and contrasted look I wanted to give the model. With a soft light source like a softbox or a beauty dish, they allow too much light to spread and cover the rest of the scene with light, meaning the water droplets didn’t look as crisp, and the shadows were to soft for my liking.

Previously, I had tried to shoot it with a large reflector and the strip softboxes as I said, I still got great images but I felt I could get more from the shoot by changing it.

I’m super happy with the results of the #makeitrain shoot, I will always be looking to improve my work but I wanted to share with you what we had done and taken on the day.

The rain rig is simply some copper pipes with some T pieces to attach the shower heads, one thing I will change for the future is the central head as the rain fall is too concentrated and needs to spread more evenly, but at the time I didn’t have anything else to use.

We had a wicked day shooting and all in all the models have been very impressed by the images.

Here are some of the images we took on the day, please let me know what you think!!