5 Ways to Improve Your Halloween Photography

No matter if you are at a party, a parade, or attempt Halloween street photography in your hometown, the following five advices will help you shoot in a way that captures the mood of the haunted night.

1. Leave your flash at home and shoot with high ISO instead
Unless you really know what you are doing, I recommend that you not bother using your flashlight. This might come as a surprise to you since most of your Halloween shots will take place in low light situations. However, if you consider how brutal flash lights are when carelessly set, you can probably imagine that not much of the spooky Halloween mood will be left in your photographs. There are experts who know how to do this right although I have yet to see many examples where it was done nicely. This is why I recommend you choose another path: if not much light is available, try to increase the ISO of your camera as much as you can.
When it comes to ISO, you need to know your camera and at which setting it starts to produce image noise to an extent that is unbearable. Once you figure this out, simply stay below this number. Generally, compact cameras with very high resolution tend to show a stronger increase in image noise with increasing ISO numbers. Besides many other things, larger camera systems such as SLRs do a much better job in the ISO department. Keep in mind that each camera has different characteristics. With a few experiments or by studying the EXIF data of the pictures you already took, you can quickly figure out which ISO is useful for you.

2. Use a fast lens
A fast lens is a lens with a large aperture. Such lenses are built to let in large amounts of light into your camera body. How much light your lens is letting in at a time will be a crucial factor when you are out there during Halloween night. The more light, the shorter you can set the exposure time. The best practice is to set your camera to aperture priority mode. This mode allows you to choose the aperture so that you can set it to the largest possible (the smallest f-number). In this mode, the camera automatically chooses the right exposure time for you, which is very convenient.
If you have a little bit of experience, you also know that a large aperture can help you to isolate your subject from the background. This is an important cornerstone for appealing portraits regardless if you shoot at day or night. To give you some numbers, I have successfully been using prime lenses on the streets at night. These lenses had focal lengths between 30mm and 85mm, and maximum apertures between f/1.4 and f/1.8.

3. Shoot RAW
Using the camera’s RAW format over the processed and compressed JPEG format is particularly a good choice when you want to post-process your images. The reason is simply because there is more information in each pixel of a RAW image. In many cases, you might not see this difference when comparing a RAW to its JPEG counterpart with your bare eyes. However, your computer sees much more in these pixels than your eyes. When you process your image, the computer has more material to work with, therefore giving you more freedom when pushing the sliders of your software. The kind of processing I mostly do on nightly Halloween pictures is the use of noise reduction filters and exposure compensation to brighten up the scenes.

4. Move around
Because you won’t use a flash light, you are very dependent on the light that is available. By changing your position and experimenting with angles, you will eventually find light that is good for the sort of images you want to create. Once you find something good, stay there and keep shooting for a while. Take good advantage of the spot you find, but at some point, move on to another one. By changing your position your images will show changing backgrounds. This will not only keep the viewers of your images entertained, but also yourself in the process of taking them.

5. Dress up and become part of the crowd
Here I’m giving you an advice I haven’t followed myself yet. However, I will say that your subjects will look the best and most authentic when you become part of the crowd rather than being perceived as an observer. If you are able to interact naturally with your subjects, they will also appear natural in your photographs. Dress up, be funny, and have fun!

Dawn-ish

I often get to see the most photogenic things coincidentally while driving by, usually while on a highway. The best way to deal with this is always having a camera with you. In most cases I find it to be the best procedure to take the very next exit once I spotted something and get to stop the car as soon as possible. Because I have such a terribly bad sense for orientation, I would use the iPhone to check what I just looked at and dig out the street names of an intersection that's around that spot. Then punch it in to my clumsy GPS and voila!

This sort of photography is a lot about opportunity. I guess the art is anticipating opportunities and become aware.

Liquid Heaven

First try photographing in the water (click on the image to enlarge for a better in-water-experience).

Have you ever walked deep into the ocean while holding a Canon 5D II? I'm telling you, it's a strange feeling. While paddling around on a surfboard the other day I came to the conclusion that I need some sort of underwater housing for my camera to capture such beautiful moments. Now the typical price tag for such a piece of equipment is ridiculously high if you ask me. I understand it's a tiny niche and the housings are customized for each model, but $1500 for playing around a little is just too much in my case. After some searching and discussion with friends on twitter, I finally found something that does the job for much less money. I got this one for just $95. After the first test run I can tell you that the camera staid perfectly dry.

Creating Something

The joy of being creative and outputting something. That's what this page is all about - it's my personal creative outlet.

I want to let you know that if you are creative and would like to use something from my website for your non commercial project, you can feel free to take it. My only request is that you link to this website as your source. I also added a little disclaimer to the top of the page.

10 easy steps to get the right colors when printing...

...or better be prepared to be surprised...that's a line in a song I'm listening to as I'm writing. It's from the soundtrack of "Dan in real life" - great movie.

Anyway, what I actually wanted to say is: be prepared to be surprised when you send your images to a printing service the first time. And I mean one that assumes that you are somewhat serious. One that does not use some kind of color correction, but assumes that you took care of color management yourself. I was pretty surprised when I did this for the first time and got almost completely black prints back. That was a couple of years ago. Since then I became very careful when it comes to printing.

Now behind it is a whole science which I'm not familiar with. I cannot even direct you to a good website explaining all this, because I simply didn't read into it. But I can still share with you some practical tips that I picked up. So far this has been working for me. If you have also ideas how to do this, feel free to leave a comment.

Here are some hints what you might wanna do in order to not throw your money out of the window, and instead get the same colors on paper that you see on your screen:

1. Ask your print shop for test prints of a kind of standard test image.
What you need is a test print that has been done on the same printer and paper your work is going to be printed with. A serious print shop has many different version of this one image and will recommend you to take those from them for free.

2. You also need this particular test image as a file.

3. The third thing you will need is an ICC profile for this printer. The ICC profile is a file that you can load into your image processing software. It will help to emulate the color behavior of the printer.

Now when you have all these three things, you can calibrate your screen. You have to do the following:

4. Open the test image with your image software.

5. In the color management of your software, switch to the ICC profile of the printer. The picture might now appear very different from before in terms of color, brightness, and constrast.

6. Next you hold the printed test image next to the screen.

7. You now adjust the screen settings until the print and the digital version on the screen appear equal, with matching colors, brightness, etc.

If you did this right, any pictures you load from now on into your software will look equal to how it would look when you would send it to the print shop. Most likely it won't look good anymore, so read on.

Now comes the annoying part:

8.With the altered screen settings and the profile loaded, you need now to adjust each image that you want to print until it looks the way you want.
So make a backup copy of it and start adjusting.

9. This altered image is the one you wanna send for printing. It's a terrible overhead, but definitely worth it if you are eager to get in print what you see on the screen. You can store your screen settings for the next time, so you don't need to go through everything again next time you want to print.

Why I'm writing all this right now? I just went through this as I'm preparing the Halloween exhibition. Not that I have any time for this right now, but it has to be done.
Because there are so many images that need to be printed (about 30) I don't want to risk that they are all off. So I added another step to the workflow:

10. If you have a large order of expensive prints, it might be a good idea to order only one print first and use this to double check/double calibrate the screen - see picture below. There was still a difference between the image on the screen and the printed one, so I was glad I did this extra step.


A picture of my desk while trying to match the screen with the print (step 10).

I hope this was useful for someone. Cheers!