Today’s Post by Blue Moon Staff
Halloween falls on a full Moon once every nineteen years, on average. Since the Moon is full about once every 29.5 days and October is 31 days long, all Halloween full moons are Blue Moons. Blue Moon! Lunar views are always a treat
As adults you don’t usually get a chance to wear your Halloween costume more than just once a year. Wearing a costume lets us create the kind of images that are fun to make for both photographer and client. And when you’re all dressed up, clients seems to get more involved in the session, they let their hair down and just plain have fun.
Here’s an interesting aspect of shooing Halloween portraits: When your subjects are dressed in any kind of costume, they seems to get more personally involved in the session. In addition to getting a chance to create some great looking images that can be added to your portfolio, you also get to add another potential sale from the session. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.
How I made this photograph: Today’s portraits were made during a shoot that I had a few years ago with the famous Internet model Maria Cedar. Knowing I’d be photographing Maria during October, I suggested that he wear an Elvira, Mistress of the Dark costume for our shoot because both Maria and Elvira have larger-than-life personalities and the pose at above right was one of her reinterpretations of that icon.But as the shoot progressed, the vibe of the shoot changed becoming less Elvira and more Maria!
The lighting setup for this portrait was simple: A red Paul C. Buff DigiBee DB800 with a Plume Ltd hexagonal Wafer soft box attached was placed at camera right. A 40-inch Westcott 5-in-1 reflector was placed at camera left. That’s it. She was photographed against a black Savage Infinity vinyl backdrop that was hung from my JTL background stands. The camera used was a Panasonic Lumix GH4 with Lumix G Vario 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 lens (at 45mm) with an exposure of 1/125 sec at f/6.3 and ISO 200.
The RAW file was initially retouched in Photoshop before applying Imagenomics’ Portraiture plug-in. My original concept for this image was that it would be am image that would be converted to black & white using Silver Efex Pro but I also like this color version, that has an touch of Color Efex Pro’s Glamour Glow filter.
Here’s a book nude photography that should be in everybody’s bookshelf:
