Archive for October, 2007
How to photograph pumpkins
October 31st, 2007 | 
Author: Wahoo! Tonight is the night! I get to really tear one up tonight with several flaming pumpkins, lots of candy, creepy music and some scary movies. I’m all excited.
But, the big question is, how do you take pictures of pumpkins that look good, but don’t have a 3 foot flame shooting out of them? There are several things to do depending on what equipment you want to take with you.
Unless you have a stabilizing lens, the sure fire method is the tripod. Shutter speeds of 1/5 sec give great results if you want the pumpkin to really glow or if there isn’t much light inside it. In most cases the longer exposure the better. Most of my pumpkins are taken at 1/5 sec – 2 sec exposures with a setting of ISO 100. It’s best to use a remote trigger/shutter release to make sure you don’t bump the camera.
If you don’t want to wander around with a tripod, set the camera to ISO 400 or so and you should be able to get 1/80 sec or higher shutter speeds. This should allow you to capture the pumpkin with plenty of detail and no blur. They’re stationary so you just need to worry about your own hand shake.
You can also turn on the porch light, shine a flashlight near the pumpkin or get low and focus right on the light source. Using a flash will take out of a lot of the warm orange color and give you an obvious bright spot so make sure it’s off. If there are multiple pumpkins together, try to use the light of all of them to grab the shot. They will help illuminate each other.
If you have a small point and shoot camera like my Sony WC100 you can use one of the minature tripods to hold the camera. They’re about $12-15 from places like BestBuy, they’re collapsible and lightweight. Very easy to take with you.
If you’re not using a tripod the best time for the photos is right at dusk. You can use the light to grab all the details.
I will hopefully have several new specimens for my gallery tonight. We’ll see what dastardly creations I can come up with.
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The hours are ticking away until Halloween.
The hours are ticking away until Halloween. As they say, the witching hour is close at hand.
I tried out two more pumpkin templates this weekend, a pirate and tiki face. They both worked out pretty well. Once again I had two pumpkins going at one time. For the main event, I may actually have 5 or 6 of them going at once. I will open the gates and unleash all manner of hellfire on my neighbors. If it works correctly it should be one heck of a display and should send owners and children running for cover!
Here are the latest two creations in my gallery. The pirate face looks pretty cool, but the Tiki almost looks more like a kitty face. Although an angry kitty on fire would still be scary it’s not quite the look I was going for.
European AutoFair 2007
European AutoFair 2007
I went to the Euro Auto Fair on Saturday which is held in Greer SC at the BMW Motorworks (factory). It was an amazing display of European cars from Audi’s to Volkswagen.
Austin Healey was the featured car and there were plenty of them. What a beautiful and compact roadster. And speaking of compact there were several true mini’s, vintage Volkswagen Beetles and vintage Porsches. Many of these participants drive their cars to the show. When we left they headed out to the highway with the rest of us. Pretty cool to see those vintage machines hit the road.
In conjunction with the vintage was the ultra modern and space aged such as the Ferrari F40, F430, Testarossa and even two DeLoreans made an appearance. They still look pretty cool.
There was even a small autocross course you could go to and drive the BMW Z4 just to see how it handled. I didn’t give it a go, but I watched quite a few others. Some rather unusual cornering techniques I have to admit.
It was a good time and some wild cars. You can check them out at:
Euro Auto Fair
