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For Halloween, we wanted to do something. Actually, we’re always looking to do something fun and creative with photography. So our Halloween social image (seen below) quickly became a full-on project for the kid in all of us.
First we nailed down the concept and then set off to accomplish it. This meant some very awkward stares as we shoveled up two buckets of sand from the volleyball court outside our offices. We’ll put it back 🙂 Then we set off to scavenge a few tree limbs and other items down by the river for the pieces of our landscape. Next, after some office debate and testing, we settled on the perfect faces for the pumpkins. All that was left was to make a few props and stage it all – which took about three hours.
Now for the photo. I knew lighting was going to be what made the shot, and that I was going to have to experiment a bit. I took one light from our Profoto B1 Location Kit and placed a red gel with rubber bands over it. I then placed it behind our scene as it would be the glowing moon in our shot. At first I thought I would need it to flash with the other Profoto studio lights. This sort of worked, but it didn’t produce the look I was going for. It just didn’t look like the moon was lighting the image.
After a lot of trial and error, I ended up with the following for the shot. I put the Profoto studio light with the gel on modeling mode with it set to the max. I then used two additional studio lights as flashes. One to the left low down at about 10%, and the second up high looking down on the right at about 15%. Then I set the camera (Canon 5Dmk3 with Canon 85mm f/1.2) for a long exposure. It was between 3-5 sec for the final shot. The flashes in the front provided just a hint of foreground light while. This allowed the light with the red gel to become the main light and produced some really creepy shadows.
Finally we brought it into Photoshop and then we just needed to remove the fishing line that we used to prop up everything. We added a bit of black vignetting, but mostly, about 95% was achieved in camera.