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]

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!