Taking Better Halloween Photos

Here are some tips to capture your little goblins this weekend. These tips would work for anytime you need to take photos at night in the dark. 

This post is from Nick Kelsh, How to Photograph Your Baby as posted on his Facebook page, "How to Photograph Your Baby" on 10/26/10

Dear All,

Here are a few Halloween thoughts from someone who has never taken a trick or treat photo I really love. I have tried, however, and I have come to some conclusions that one of you may get something out of.

Accept the fact that it's unlikely you will shoot a wonderful photograph after dark (with a flash, obviously) of the little angels—or devils or fairy princesses. Probably the thing to keep in mind is to get a good shot of that costume you put so much work into. A photo just for the family record.

So, get a shot of the costume before you leave home. Use that time to get you settings straight on your camera. Put your focus on manual. You and your camera will go crazy trying to make the auto-focus work out there on the battlefield. It won’t work. Auto-focus needs light to function and for all practical purposes there isn’t any on a dark street. I would say to focus on about 8 feet. Get a feeling for how far you should be from your subject at home and when you get outside try to shoot your pictures from that distance. Shooting with manual focus will eliminate much of the “shutter lag” problem.

Turn your flash on. If you can put that on manual do that, too.

Turn the ISO up to something like 800. If your test pictures are too noisy turn it down to 400. There’s a lot of variation in camera performance from model to model here so it’s impossible for me to get specific but turn it up.

Put your camera on manual exposure. A shutter speed of 1/15 of a second and an f-stop of f5.6 would be a good place to start. Under good lighting conditions 1/15th of a second would result it lots of motion blur—either from squirmy subjects or squirmy photographers—but shooting in the dark with a flash is going to eliminate a lot of that.

Play with the camera at home in dim light to see that the flash setting is cooperating with the f-stop and shutter speed. In other words, get the camera on all manual and gain some confidence with you focus distance and exposure.

When you’re out on the doorsteps and under the street lights the 1/15th of a second may allow you to actually use some of the existing light, too. If those lights are in the background it will give the picture some depth and not have that taken in outerspace look.But street lights and house lights won’t have much effect on actually lighting your kids. That will all come from the flash. We’re getting experimental here. If you’re in an experimental mood go outside with your camera alone the night before Halloween and get the kinks worked out. And there will be kinks.

I usually don’t spend a lot of time looking through the viewfinder in these situations. That can be very confusing in the dark. I just hold the camera in space and guess at the framing. You will surprise yourself how good you can get at that in a short time. Keep the camera on a fairly wide zoom and leave it there for the evening if you can.

Bring a flashlight for when you mess up your settings. It’s probably a good idea to make a little cheat sheet if you get confused. A piece of white tape or a white label with settings written down can be attached to the bottom of the camera and can be pretty useful.

Finally, Halloween can be a nice time to photograph all those people you live with and never photograph—your neighbors. When your kids are at someone’s doorstep they—the kids—have their backs to you, but your neighbors will be facing you with smiles on their faces. Admittedly, the light from you flash is nasty but I have taken some fun pictures of neighbors and they’re nice things to email.

And I know I already said it, but bring a flashlight.