Mr. Yuk is ... orange

[nonelvis]

Eh, not so bad, considering I only had half an hour to carve him and I drew him freeform on the surface of the pumpkin. Next year, if I'm feeling ambitious enough, I'll do the full stencil and peeling thing.

This is the first time I've tried messing with the settings on the camera, and though I didn't get quite the glowy effect I wanted, it's better than I expected considering I have virtually no idea what I'm doing.



Mr. Yuk, freshly carved and waiting for a candle. Really, the best thing about carving a pumpkin, in my opinion, is not the finished product, but the pumpkin seeds. Mine just came out of the oven -- I roasted them with olive oil, salt, chili powder, garlic powder, and smoked paprika.


The Fimo Inu is totally unrelated to Hallowe'en, but I've been meaning to take photos of it for ages. Our friend mmancuso, sculptor extraordinaire, brought over some Fimo years ago, and I ended up making a tiny Inu. Her ears have fallen off, but it's still clearly her.


Just to give you an idea of scale, here's a (slightly out of focus) photo of the Fimo Inu and a penny.

Comments

[platypus]

Cute! Both the pumpkin and the Fimo Inu.

I suggest turning off the flash, setting the camera on something and using the self-timer to take a photo of the pumpkin. I can't quite tell if the darker picture had flash on or just a lot of ambient light, but eliminating the former/reducing the latter would probably help with the glowiness.

He looks really disgusted about the chunks of pumpkin on the table :).

[nonelvis]

I had some vague memory of people saying you should turn off the flash and use a long exposure for lit pumpkin shots, so that was the first thing I tried. Uh, assuming I actually adjusted the exposure correctly, since like I said, I have no idea what I'm doing. Unfortunately, all the shots I took like that were so dark pretty much all you could see was glowy pumpkin features floating in midair. The shot I ended up with did use the flash, but I reduced its brightness as much as the camera allowed.

Would the self-timer have helped by forcing an even longer exposure?

(Also, all the EXIM data is over at Flickr if taking a look at that will tell you how I screwed up.)

[platypus]

Hmm. If the problem is that you want more pumpkiny context instead of disembodied features, the best way to get it is to add a little ambient light. Flash adds light, but even low flash tends to overwhelm anything glowy in the picture. A longer exposure, if the only light source anywhere is the pumpkin itself, will most likely just get you brighter disembodied features.

If the whole image is too dim, though, where you can see the pumpkin but the camera isn't showing it, and adding any more external light would kill the effect of the glowiness, a longer exposure would help. There's probably a 'night' scene mode that will up the maximum exposure time, so that might be a simple thing that's worth trying, though scene modes are not terribly smart. Or you could go to shutter priority mode (I think it has one?) and try some different shots in the half second to 1.5 second range. Don't fear shutter priority, for it is awesome.

The self timer trick is just to avoid camera shake. Unless you have a really solid tripod, it's easy to blur pictures just by pressing the shutter. Even your flash shot was 1/40 second, which is slower than most people (okay, slower than I) can handhold.

[nonelvis]

If the whole image is too dim, though, where you can see the pumpkin but the camera isn't showing it

That's exactly the problem. I'll check for a night mode and shutter priority mode; I am reasonably certain the camera has both.

Thanks!

[mmancuso.livejournal.com]

I have always liked that fimo inu. What is the japanese character for "fimo-inu"? I think someone should make a sculpture of a penny so that the above picture can be recreated with the real inu. I DO have lots of copper foil..... :) We'd have to tape her ears back. But, then, if we approached her with tape, I gather she'd lay her ears back automatically.