Get Creative With Your Halloween Pictures

This is a great time of year for fun and creative photos of your kids and family.  This year I wanted to step out of my familiar editing style and experiment with various elements to elevate the fun and magic of Halloween.  This also engaged my children and had them eagerly participating in pictures.  

VARY YOUR STYLE: Whenever I approach a personal project, I always try to produce two different styles for the image I have in mind.  I will typically do one light and airy and then the other dark and moody. This pushes me to vary and manipulate the light on my subject, thereby conveying the mood I want to portray and finally, determining how I will complete my editing

PLAY WITH OVERLAYS AND BRUSHES IN YOUR EDITING SOFTWARE: Overlays and brushes are great tools to let your creative side shine.  What better time to put them to use than creating unique images for Halloween.  If you have Adobe’s creative-cloud subscription there are hundreds of free brushes you can download. When in Photoshop, go to your Brushes menu and choose “get more brushes”. You can also try Creative Market, which is an online store where you can find all sorts of tools to assist with the vision of your project.  Templates, fonts, brushes, overlays and so much more. I found some fun overlays to help me with this recent witch project.

SPECIAL EFFECTS and PROPS: The day of Halloween can be a bit crazy to capture the more creative images, so I try to get the kids dressed up in advance.  This way we have plenty of time to experiment with special effects and props. This year I purchased colorful Smoke bombs from  https://shutterbombs.com.  This was the perfect prop to get the 9 and 10 year olds excited and engaged with Halloween pictures.  We all look forward to experimenting more with these fun special effects.