Leo Kowal » Halloween

How to Take Night Pictures of Your Yard Haunt or Prop

Leo Kowal — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:13:05 +0000

Taking a picture of your yard haunt during the day simply doesn’t do it justice. You can take pictures with your camera’s built in flash, but that also takes away from the spookiness. We all want to give our pictures that ghostly feel that you can only get from darkness, but taking pictures at night can be very challenging because of the lack of light. Night photography usually ends up smudged, blurry or way too dark. With the right equipment and technique you’ll be taking brilliant night shots with very little effort!

This tutorial will be broken down into 3 parts.

Equipment Overview
Aperture and Shutter Speed
Shooting

Equipment Overview:

In order to continue with this tutorial, please make sure that your camera has a “manual” option. If you are not sure, please refer to your owner’s manual for more information.

Based on my experience and research, standard point and shoot cameras usually do not have a manual option. Most advanced point and shoot cameras and all digital SLR cameras have a manual option.

In addition to a camera with a manual setting, you will need a sturdy tripod. Using a tripod is 100% necessary and without one your images will turn out blurry.

Aperture and Shutter Speed

Note: Since this is not a photography website, I won’t go into too much detail on aperture and shutter speed, but rather give you just enough information so that you can apply the knowledge while you shoot.

Just like the iris in the human eye, every lens on every camera, no matter how big or small, cheap or expensive, has an iris diaphragm that regulates the amount of light that will enter the camera. The size of the hole created by the iris diaphragm is called the aperture (The Pupil is the hole in the iris that lets in the light). The aperture value on your camera will be a numeric value usually between 1.2 and 32 (Not all cameras and/or lenses have a full range of 1.2 thru 32). The lower the number, the more light the lens lets in. The higher the number, the less light the lens will let in. With this in mind, the first step in taking a successful night shot is setting your aperture to the lowest possible setting to allow in as much light as possible.

Next, comes shutter speed. The shutter speed on your camera regulates how long light enters the camera. Most if not all digital SLR cameras allow you to leave the shutter open for as long as 30 seconds and as short as 1/1000th of a second. Obviously a shutter speed of 1 second will allow in more light then a shutter speed of 1/1ooth of second.

Shooting:

Mount your camera on a tripod and frame your subject in the viewfinder on your camera. Set the camera to manual, adjust the aperture to the lowest possible setting, set the shutter speed to 1 second and snap the picture. Use the camera’s LCD display to determine if you like the picture? (The LCD is not 100% accurate and I would not rely on it for professional applications, but for this tutorial its fine!) Depending on the time of day and the amount of available light, the picture may be too dark or too light. If the picture is too dark, increase the shutter speed from 1 second to 2 seconds. If the picture is too light, decrease the shutter speed to 1/15th of a second. Keep making these adjustments until you are happy with the result.

I cannot recommend an exact setting because every situation is different so just experiment with the settings until you get it just right!

Happy Shooting and Happy Halloween!

Outdoor Jack O’ Lanterns

Leo Kowal — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 02:23:53 +0000

Shooting Jack O’ Lanterns in the studio is fun, but I’ve never had more fun shooting gourds then the time I shot them outside with a fog machine. I usually start carving Jack O’ Lanterns around mid September and continue all the way through Halloween. While shooting in the studio, I thought about how cool it would be to shoot the Jack O’ Lanterns on hay bails with some creepy fog in the background. For the most part, the images below are pretty much what I was after. Next time, I am going to try using a blue(ish) light to make the fog look more creepy and less fiery.

In the images below, I took the carved Jack O’ Lanterns and placed them on hay bails. I had a flood lamp with a red bulb and placed it pointing up behind the hay bails. I had the fog machine right behind the hay bail so that the fog would hit the hay and rise up immediately. I used 1 Alien Bee B800 and shot it through an umbrella for the key light. I set the camera on a tripod and used a combination of flash and long exposure for these images.

Witch Hazel Portraits and Gallery Event

Leo Kowal — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:13:01 +0000

The idea for this started just like every one of my Halloween shoots. I just wanted to shoot Halloween related stock and just started going down the list of things I could possibly shoot. Mary and I decided that she would make a great witch… we were right!

We went to a local Spirit Halloween store and found all of the fixins for a witch: fake chin, fake nose, special glue for the fake parts, wax for missing teeth, makeup and a witch hat and gown. Prior to the shoot, we went to the library and checked out some books on theatrical / studio makeup to help us since we were new to the whole make-up and prosthetic thing.

In the studio, we simply placed an Alien Bee 800 with a white shovel background reflector pointed at the black seamless background paper behind the witch and used a medium softbox as the key light.

While shopping my Halloween Collage at the local Gallery’s Choice art gallery in Downers Grove, IL. The owner approached me and wanted to know if we would be interested in doing a portrait session. Something similar to “Get your photo with Santa or the Easter Bunny”,but a bit more of my style. Dark and Haunted! We decided to go ahead with it! Check out some of the results!

One of the images was chosen as iStock’s Free Image of the Week. This file was downloaded over 35,000 times by the iStock community!