Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbie1/1174623/

Halloween brings the opportunity for many things: candy, chaos, getting the bejezzus scared out of ya…just to name some of the favorites. It also brings some chances for some great photos. Whether you’re taking photos of people in crazy costumes, or creating a reminder of your girlfriend’s “sexy nurse” outfit to put in the folder of goodies you’ve hidden on your hard drive, Halloween brings some interesting (and sometimes aggravating) challenges when it comes to photography. Here are 3 quick tips (more reminders really) to make sure you’re getting some good photos tonight.

Lighting

Lighting is always an issue with photography, but it’s even more important than usual on Halloween. You might be amazed at just how completely NON-scary that creepy zombie looks bathed in the artificially suped-up light of a picture taken with a flash or just how funny the colours end up looking i that photo of the kid covered in glow-sticks. Stick to natural light whenever possible, or at least keep the extra light to a minimum to avoid a serious case of “damn, that looked so much better in the dark”.

White Balance

For the love of all that is unholy and ghoulish, set your white balance properly. It’s hard enough to deal with white balance after the fact on a normal day. On a day when the entire point is to have your senses assaulted with strange costume outfits and colours in a dark environment there is no way to deal with white balance after the fact with any degree of accuracy.

Avoid a Sugar High

Depending on the sort of photos you’re taking, you may need to drop your shutter speed down quite a lot to get a decent photo without destroying the creepy/hilarious/whatever effect. That means you may need to hold the camera more steady than usual, and that could be tough if you’re hopped up on sugar too early. If you plan on getting low shutter speed photos that aren’t blurry as all hell, I’d avoid the candy if I were you. Or, if you’re smart, use a tripod and pig out.

Happy Halloween…and please, if you get some great shots tonight, don’t hesitate to drop some links to them in the comments here. I’d love to see ‘em.

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Photo Source: http://flickr.com/photos/billselak/987323495/

Admittedly, I hate using the flash unless it’s absolutely necessary, so I may be biased when I say that I think people use the flash FAR too much. Often to the detriment of the photo they are trying to take. There are exceptions of course, but it’s very VERY rare that you actually need to use your flash under normal circumstances if you’re setting up your shot properly using a combination of the ISO setting, aperture setting, and shutter speed. To me the flash is a last ditch effort to save a photo that cannot be taken any other way, and should be avoided whenever possible.

I have worked as a professional photographer off and on (I will admit, I’ve been “off” for more of less 2 years now), and I am always amazed at just how fast many people will jump to their flash before even attempting to properly setup the shot without it.

Maybe I’m too much of a “light purest”, or whatever you want to call it, but I just don’t like destroying the natural light of the photo if it can in any way be avoided, and I would highly suggest that people only use their flash as a last resort, or as a means to get a specific lighting effect, and not as a be all and end all way of “getting the lighting right” or some other excuse to be lazy with the setup of the shot.

For the sake of natural light everywhere, I implore you, use your flash sparingly, and only when it’s absolutely needed to get the shot you want. You’ll thank me later when you don’t end up with a bunch of photos that are flooded in artificial light and almost certainly ruining at least some of the magic of the original moment. Or maybe you won’t, and you think I’m an idiot for suggesting it, who knows. By all means chew me out in the comments…you might even convince me.

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Shooting in Camera RAW

The "Camera RAW" editing window.

Your camera should have several quality settings, whether they’re called “good, better, best” or “small, medium, large” or whatever, and are usually in some form of compressed image, like a JPEG. Find the setting to change it, and crank it all the way to the maximum, which SHOULD be “RAW”. (NOTE: Some cameras have multiple RAW options, always use the one that leaves you with the least amount of availible photos, and thus the largest file size per photo, for the best results)

This is basically telling the camera to save all the information regarding what it is doing when you take a photo and saving it all, rather than guessing at how you want to deal with it and doing the compression into a JPEG for you…losing potientially valuable information in the process. This extra information is what makes the RAW format so useful, as I will demonstrate with an old photo from a poorly lit New Year’s Eve party.

When you open up a photo in RAW format(I would suggest using Adobe Bridge, but that’s just a personal preference), you have a lot of options to modify and potentially enhance the quality of an image that you wouldn’t have with the usual JPEG formats.

Notice how dark the photo is? Typical party lighting is a serious pain to deal with accurately (especially without blinding everyone with the flash, which I wouldn’t suggest if you want to be invited back). With camera RAW though, we get all sorts of tools to help this photo crawl out of the dark and into much better condition (among other things, like white balance correction and more complex things that will come later). Simply play with the “Exposure”, “Brightness”, and in this case “Vibrance” a little, and you’ll see just how drastically a few simple sliders can improve the quality of the photo far beyond what you could do to a JPEG…without also drastically reducing the general quality of the photo at least. A few tweaks and a click on the “SAVE” button later, and we end up with something more like the photo below.

The enhanced photo. Aprox 5 seconds of work.

The brightness is fixed, the colours stand out more, and there was absolutely no more work put into the taking of the photo. The biggest advantage of shooting in the “RAW” format is the flexibly. You don’t have to get every shot perfect, and can get great results much more easily. The goal of course is to improve enough that you don’t often need to do much (or any) tweaking to most of your photos, but a safety net never hurt anyone. You don’t have to use it every time, but if you aren’t shooting in “RAW”, you won’t have the option when you really need it.

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