HALLOWEEN FUN TIME!!

I love autumn with all its beautiful vivid colors and the cooler temperature in brings. It's also that time of year again for making Halloween images! I LOVE PUMPKINS AND GOURDS!

I took some shots of a very old cemetery in my area last year. I actually brought two pumpkins with me that day and placed them in various places for the shoot. Let me say first I love cemeteries and feel very peaceful and calm there with all the gravestones.

They can make a great image for Halloween but please always show respect and leave everything like it was like before you came.

There are a couple of places I go to quite regularly to shoot old fences and vines. The second was taken in studio with natural light in the late afternoon.

It can be a fun time to just have fun, be created and let your imagination run wild!!

I love spooky and scary but I also love fun colorful images for Halloween.

I’m working on a few image composites right now with all these ideas in mind. I thought I would show you one I've just finished yesterday and explain the way it came together. This is the finished image.

I only used two images for this composite. I masked out the foreground image in Photoshop and place it in front of the background shot but also increasing the overall size of the final project to accommodate both. Some cleaning up was needed on the pumpkin image with the eraser tool. 

After tweaking it a little I flattened both images and saved it as a JPG. 

I added a couple of ghosts just for fun with some brushes I created and applied them in an overlay and inverted the layer. For me the fun starts here with some layers of dodging, burning and blending modes. 

It takes a little time but composites are a lot of fun to do and with practice you get better and better!! 

Here is another image done the same way but with another "color theme".

Here are some other images created with the same type of composite work!
Now back to doing more fun images for the Halloween season! :)

BEHIND THE SCENES: Making of an "At the beach image"!

A day at the beach is the best place to capture beautiful summer images but sometimes it's just not possible. Here are several  images that were from a photo shoot I did last week. Hopefully it shows you that you can do some summer images indoors and not under the hot summer sun.

This is what it looked like in the studio.

The background was masked out and a beach image of sun and water (that was taken last year) was inserted into the background.
With a little tweaking in Photoshop for vibrancy and saturation this is the finished image. 

  Here's another finished image with basically the same setup from that shoot!

 They are a lot of fun to do and the possibilities are endless!!

 Hopefully I've given you some ideas to do your own SUMMER FUN IMAGES!! :)

These images is available for download at Shutterstock.com, Fotolia.com and Dreamstime.com

More links located on left side.