How to Take Pictures of Your Jack-O-Lanterns

How many of us have painstakingly pulled out all the guts from your child’s freezing pumpkin, helped them carve or “supervise” them carving away (aka preventing any loss of digits.) Only to go through alllll that work to end up with a photo that looks like one of these?

Almost makes you not want to pull out the pumpkin knives, amiright? I kid. But in all seriousness most of the times our jack-o-lantern pictures fall short of how amazing they actually are - or in my toddlers’ case, just the fact that we actually carved them. 

So, what do we do?

If you take away nothing else from this post other than this, I will be happy.

TURN OFF YOUR FLASH

Just in case it didn’t stick, I’m going to say that again; TURN OFF YOUR FLASH.

I know this would appear to go against everything that makes sense, right? It’s dark, photos need light, therefore turn on that flash and let her rip! But no. If you had the proper set up, equipment and knowledge of flash then, by all means, fire away. But the thing is most people don’t. Most people are going to whip out their phones. Phones are amazing and so good for capturing the snapshots of your life. But because they are made for snapshots, they have to have a blanket approach. A “One size fits all” if you will. This is one of the (many) times were camera phone flash does not fit all. 

Let’s have a quick little breakdown of how flash on a camera phone works. When it fires and goes off, it is going to light up the closest thing to it. So in the above pictures, you can see my finger got in the frame and that’s where it exposed for, leaving the jack-o-lanterns dark. In the next picture, you may be thinking that it l looks fine, right? Well the flash triggered and exposed for the railing. The pumpkins are not terribly exposed, but they also seem a bit flat since you don’t really get the full effect of the candle lit.

So what do you do?

Turn off the flash and prop up your camera. 

That’s it.

In turn, you’ll get images like this -

See how much better that looks? Not only do you get the depth you were lacking with the flash, you also get the detail of the candle lit faces being illuminated on the pavement. A flash is going to erase that little detail. And depending on if you have an iPhone, if you shoot your photo in “live” view you can swipe up on your picture and either loop the live for a fun, flickering little gif or select long exposure and then you’ll be able to get more candle light out of your pumpkins. 

So, just for a little side by side comparison; left flash, right no flash. So much better, right?!