Photo Tip Tuesday - Week Four, How to Shoot Your Pumpkins

I've never really tried shooting carved pumpkins before so I experimented a little.  At first, I tried to just hand hold my camera.  I opened the aperture up to 1.8 (as wide as that lens would go) and slowed the shutter down to 1/50 second (about the slowest I can hand hold my camera and get some half way decent focus!)

Even at that setting, the result was very dark.



So I set up my tripod. I closed down to 3.5 and tried a shot on "aperture priority" mode to see what shutter speed the camera recommended and how it came out. The camera chose a full 6 second exposure! And it made quite a difference!



But I decided I liked the picture a little dark so the background would disappear a little more, but I still wanted to see some of the pumpkin (unlike my first hand held shot.) So I experimented a few shots on some different settings--the beauty of manual exposure! I settled on f/3.5 and a 2 second exposure.

I just think it looks a little spookier that way!



Then for fun I extended the canvas on the shot and use the cloning tool to make it look like that rail that the pumpkin sat on went all the way across and I cloned the background too.  I added some texture and then I brought the photo into Picnik and had some fun!

Hope everyone had a great Halloween!



Link up your Photo Tips or Editing tips below--and remember, if your tip can be as simple as sharing what lens you used or what your settings were!