Capturing That Great Halloween Photograph

With Halloween coming up in a few months, we'll all be grabbing our cameras to take photographs of our friends, children and relatives who make Halloween an interesting holiday. Fortunately there are tons of tips online which will help you grab that perfect photograph. Rather than link you to all of them, I've done some research of my own and am highlighting some of the tips I feel will get you that perfect photograph.

• Take lots of pictures and of lots of subjects. This is really a good tip for any type of photograph, but Holiday photographs tend to have lots of different possibilities. For instance, carving jack-o-lanterns or illuminated ghosts and goblins make interesting subject matter.
• Have lots of film or memory available for those pictures.
• For photographs with a specific subject in mind (i.e. a jack-o-lantern) be sure to include as little excess background noise as possible. This means that in the case of a cluttered background, you'll either fill the entire frame with your subject or shoot more wide open (f/5 - f/1.4). Shooting wide open will provide a shallower depth of field, and the result is simply a blurred background. Make sure that the entire subject is still in focus, unless of course you're looking for some interesting depth of field.
• Pictures such as lit up jack-o-lanterns and hordes of candy are better if they are the only subject in the shot. If you're a macro photographer, shoot macro. Otherwise, get closer, or zoom in.
• Do not set people up for group shots. Instead, let groups form naturally, especially at parties.
• Do not always center your subject. Too often we see boring pictures where the subject is directly in the middle of the frame. This halloween season try using parts of the background to enhance the foreground. This isn't easy, and perhaps it contradicts one of the other tips, but trust me, there are certain shots where you need the background. It might be a pile of pumpkins and including a stray pumpkin (that's off to the side), while providing a bit of drama, might also provide a sense of scale to the massive pile.
• Watch out for the flash. When taking pictures in low light, use a tripod instead and drop into manual mode. Leave the shutter open and capture enough light to illuminate the photograph. The flash will 9 times out of 10 ruin your photograph, though sometimes it's entirely necessary.
  
  Low light group photos for instance, are probably not possible without a flash. People tend to move, and as a result a fast shutter speed is required.
  
  If you don't know about the manual modes of your camera, check out your manufacturers support pages to find out if you have one, and if so, how to use it.
  
  Film photographers should use film with a higher ISO rating. ISO 400 is usually decent because it still provides for crisp pictures, normally with a finer grain. ISO 800 might allow you to take photos with less light, but your pictures will suffer from lousy looking grain.

There are many other tips and tricks to taking great Halloween photographs that can be found simply by searching the web. I'd like to thank Yotophoto.com for helping me find images to use in this article.

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