halloween costume pics

So I took some halloween pics of my boys this year just for fun and I’d love to show you how I did it. :) You can see the blog post with all of the pics over on my photography blog.

• I chose a location inside my home near a window.
• I used a roll of white photo paper as my backdrop and flooring.
• I turned off the overhead light. I don’t prefer that tungsten orange/yellowish light in my images.
• I used the natural light from the large window on the left side of the subject.
• I used a large silver reflector on the right side of the subject to even out the light and shadows.
• I put my 580 ex II flash on my camera with a small diffuser on the end of the flash to soften the light.
• I pointed my flash up straight toward the ceiling.
• I used my 35mm 1.4 lens (a wider angle lens).

So, the bullet points above are the step by step process that I went through when taking these pictures of my boys inside my home. I’ll give a little more explanation about a few steps in detail here below:

Flash:

Using flash is a different kind of look and something new to learn. As much as possible when shooting with a flash I prefer to point my flash up toward the ceiling. My ceiling is white and so the flash bounces off the white ceiling and just fills the room with light during that split second. Rather than if my flash was pointed directly at my subject I would get a more forced flat lit up look. I want the natural shadows on my boys faces that are supposed to be there. I want it to look real not over lit and flat.

Reflector:

Think about the light from a room coming in through a window. Think about your subject facing the window, their face is lit up but their back is not. Right? I chose to have my subject stand so that their left ear was facing the window. So now the left side of their body is more lit up than the right side of their body. Right? Think about that. Does that make sense? There’s a window on the left side of them and no window on the right. So I put a reflector on their right side. So now as the bright window light enters the room on the left side of the subject it hits the reflector and is reflected back to their right side as well. This helps to even out the light and the shadows. Understand?

Try it out. It’s fun! Play around. Here are some pictures of my boys in their costumes and the manual camera settings that I used. If you’d like to see the rest of the pictures, check them out on my photography blog.

ISO – 1000
aperture F 3.2
shutter – 1/160 second
used my 580 ex II flash
lens – 35mm 1.4

ISO – 1000
aperture F 3.2
shutter – 1/160 second
used my 580 ex II flash
lens – 35mm 1.4