Introduction: Sea Monster Pumpkin
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About: Ex video game programmer, ex Google software engineer, ex character animator, currently working as a designer
My pumpkin for Halloween this year. I didn't get a chance to document it as I was making it, but I still wanted to show off the result!
The design is original and was made by hand-sketching on the pumpkin with sharpy and then erasing it with whiteboard-erase spray when I was done carving (a new trick I learned while doing this--it takes out permanent marker like a charm!) The pumpkin took 3 straight hours to carve.
Though some of the photos were cropped, no other retouching was done in post processing. The cool color effects are all a result of using a combination of remote flashes, lighting reflectors, and blue gels for some of the photos. Some of the illuminated photos use a standard candle as a light source, and others use a remote flash inside the pumpkin itself. The flash-inside-the-pumpkin experiment turned out to have a really nice effect, and helped to avoid the blurriness that typically is a problem when photographing fire because the light was steady and so bright that the exposure time could be much shorter.
Happy Halloween!
The design is original and was made by hand-sketching on the pumpkin with sharpy and then erasing it with whiteboard-erase spray when I was done carving (a new trick I learned while doing this--it takes out permanent marker like a charm!) The pumpkin took 3 straight hours to carve.
Though some of the photos were cropped, no other retouching was done in post processing. The cool color effects are all a result of using a combination of remote flashes, lighting reflectors, and blue gels for some of the photos. Some of the illuminated photos use a standard candle as a light source, and others use a remote flash inside the pumpkin itself. The flash-inside-the-pumpkin experiment turned out to have a really nice effect, and helped to avoid the blurriness that typically is a problem when photographing fire because the light was steady and so bright that the exposure time could be much shorter.
Happy Halloween!