Amami Superman Photography

A Place to Share My Photos

Nov 2, 2009

Halloween Portraits 2009

Posted by Amami Superman

Every year we hold a trick-or-treat party/parade for our students. We always put some wall decorations together for a background and took commemorative photos of all the kids and their costumes. Every year I tried to make the background better and better and tried to make the photos look a little more nice. Here is a photo we took in 2006 for Halloween of our daughter Jade. As you can see, there's not much to what we did for a background.

I bought my camera last year in October and decided to do something extra special for the Halloween photos last year. I had this image in my head of the kind of photo I wanted to take but not having hardly a lick of photography experience, I pretty much screwed them all up. The background seemed gaudy and too bright. I didn't know how to use the different settings on my camera and couldn't take consistent photos from the auto setting. I suppose they're not bad for my first time, but in all honesty, I'm pretty embarrassed to show them to anyone. Here is a photo of our daughter Jade from last year's Halloween set I made. (cringe)

Over this past year, I've tried my best to take better photos and to study up on how to use my camera. I took what I learned from last year's Halloween and what I've learned over this past year and decided to try and step it up a level. This is what I produced.


Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/80 sec, f/2.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Captain Hook & Peter Pan
(Asahi & Hokuto Nakamura)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/100 sec, f/2.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Cinderella
(Rin Tateishi)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/80 sec, f/1.4, ISO 200 -- EXIF
The Amazing Spiderman
(Shouma Kawabata)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/100 sec, f/2.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Fairy Godmother
(Kinzan Koyuki)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/100 sec, f/2.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Jack-o'-lantern
(Yuutaro Yokoyama)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/60 sec, f/2.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Vampire
(Jade Barr)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/125 sec, f/2.0, ISO 400 -- EXIF
NAOROBO
(Naoki Izumi)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/60 sec, f/3.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Naruto - Wizard - Pirate
(Rintaro, Tenshin, Shousei Toshima)



Nikon D60, Sigma 30mm f/1.4, 1/60 sec, f/2.2, ISO 400 -- EXIF
Witch
(our dog Missy)


I didn't do too much post processing for these photos. I used Lightroom 2 to adjust the white balance (I was using tungsten lights in my soft boxes), and used the vignettes effects to get he blackened edges and just a bit of cropping.

The background I made for this year was pretty much free. I went to the dump for the lumber and used nails I found around the house. We've been using the same fake spider webs for a few years now and the leaves we picked up in the mountains off the side of the road.

We had close to 60 kids participate in the parade. I took portraits of most of them. There were some really great costumes this year. I was thinking of saving most of them for a different post.

All in all, I feel this year's photos turned out much better than last year's. I still did loads of things wrong this time, but I know what I can do better and I'm even more excited for next year.

1 comments:

Jeffrey Friedl said...

Really nicely done.... very much a bunch of steps up. It's not saying much, but I don't think I could have done as well.

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