Pumpkin Monster
Oct, 2012Views
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Awards
Way To Go
Outstanding Creativity
Jaw Dropping
Exceptional Contrast
Peer Award
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Behind The Lens
Location
The photo was taken at my family house, around Halloween. I am very lucky to have a very creative family and very creative and artistic friends. That time we gathered together to carve a pumpkin monster. And that was a lot of work! So even though we were not planning on photographing it, when you spent 3 hours building something, you do want to immortalize it in picture.Time
As I said, it did take us a while to build our little pumpkin dude. First carving, than running to Home Depot to get sticks to hold the monster together, lawn decoration... So we only started taking pictures around 10pm.Lighting
It gets dark really early in October, so there was no natural light whatsoever by the time we were ready to photograph our masterpiece. We had to pull out studio lights to light up the scene. There are two of them used in the picture: 1) First one standing near the photographer and lighting up the pumpkin monster and the people. It has a simple parabolic reflector on it. 2) Second one is on the porch, behind the monster. I added it to better separate the main scene from the background. It has a blue filter on it to match up the colors of the night and give the picture a more mystique feeling.Equipment
The equipment used is: 1) Camera - Cannon 5D mark II 2) Lens - 16-35 f/2.8L II USM 3) Studio lights - Paul C Buff Einstein™ E640 Flash UnitInspiration
The greatest inspiration for taking this picture was all the good time we had with my friends and family working on this project. Although we had no plans of photographing that evening, our creation turned out to be too good to pass up :) We started with photographing just the pumpkin monster first, and then my friend Paul suggested for my friends to act like pumpkin monster has supernatural powers and lures innocent people into becoming pumpkin monsters themselves.Editing
Despite the fact I was shooting at 1/20 of a second, the light of the candle inside the pumpkin was too dull, and got overpowered by studio lights. To compensate for that I did the following work in Photoshop: 1) Created a new empty layer on top of the picture 2) With the brush tool added some yellow color where pumpkin's eyes and mouth are and changed the layer to color overlay 3) Copied that layer and change it to screenIn my camera bag
The first thing that goes to my equipment bag is my Canon 5D MarkII. The three lenses I always carry around are 16-35, 50, and 70-200.Feedback
Whenever shooting night time pictures I highly recommend to have some kind of modeling light, as it is not easy for modern cameras to autofocus in the dark. And always keep you camera ready!
