Skip to main content

Rubber Ducky Re-Do

Rubber Duck in Balloon
Never start a conversation with your husband with the sentence, “Tomorrow can you please lube up some rubber ducks for me and put them in balloons?” He will give you a very strange look then ask why. To which my response was, “so I can fill the balloons with water then drop them in the bathtub and take pictures of the resulting splash.”  

Initial Burst (no rubber duck)
I took my lesson learned from the last I did the rubber duck drop photos and improved upon it. This time placed a splash screen in the bathroom to collect and drain the water back into the bathtub.  The splash screen was a clear shower curtain hung slightly below the camera and a couple inches out from the bathtub with the bottom of the shower curtain in the bathtub.  This work very well. There was no big mess in the bathroom and I did not have to wear a bathing suit since it contained all the water. 

For this shoot the camera was mounted on a tripod looking down onto the drop zone. The camera was set at ISO 200, f11 and a shutter speed between 1/650s – 1/1000s and had a flash mounted on it.  I also used a shutter release.  I was going to use a flash mounted under the drop zone to light the water from bellow. 

However, I cannot seem to get the trigger trap app to trigger the flash; I might need the new version for it to work properly.  Thus I have a potential future project. 

I got some decent results from this set up. Of course it needs to be refined further but for the equipment and space I have I feel I’m getting some interesting and decent photos. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cobwebs Everywhere

On October 7 th , I did a studio spooky session with Coralinx Cosplay .   The central theme of this shoot was a pretty goth girl who had a fondness for spiders and decorating with cobwebs, making it a perfect Halloween session.   Note: Cobwebs are defined as abandoned or old spiderwebs that have collected dust.   Many cobwebs are the result of comb-footed spider (i.e., black widows) that make irregularly shaped webs.   Spiderwebs are active structures built to catch prey.   (Source: Western Exterminator Company) For these sessions, I used: Photography Equipment Other Equipment Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Westcott FJ400 2 Phottix Strobes 2 strip boxes 2 rectangular soft boxes 2 c-stands 3 light stands Backdrop stand Black seamless 2 Westcott silicon gels Tether cable Laptop Laptop holder Sandbags A-clamps Spyder Color checker Fake cobwebs Table ...

Katsucon 2025 Wrap - Up

Katsucon 2025 didn’t seem as crowded as 2024, but I still wasn’t feeling it.  Katsucon will always have a special place in my heart, but I think I’m just bored with it, from a creative perspective.   While I still love working with cosplayers the location itself no longer excites me and I’m tired of fighting the crowds.  If I return to Katsucon 2026 I think I’ll just set up a studio in my room and do studio sessions.  I can be a lot more creative with a studio session, and I get to use all my lights.  So now let's talk about photography.   For Katsucon I was shooting with my Canon R6 with an 24-105 Canon RF lens, and I had a fisheye lens on me as well, but we will discuss that later.  I had two speedlights, one on camera which acted as a trigger 90-percent of the time and one on a light stand which my husband would hold during shoots. This year I booked 11 cosplay sessions and shot 869 frames.  I shot a range of ISOs from ISO 100 to ISO 800...

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough.  I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts.  However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer.  I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it.  Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed.  But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy.  He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...