It's Trick or Treat time of the year and I am all set to do a photo session that says Halloween, loud and clear. This year I decided to capture a headless horseman in a creepy cemetery... here is...
I am a toy photographer and action figure photography is one of my favourite. Its Halloween season and I could see all the toy store filled with spooky decorative items so I decided to do a photoshoot with Halloween as theme� Here is what I did and who is coming down to haunt you this year. This year�s theme is Headless Horseman, who is a long overdue Halloween photoshoot candidate. The theme of headless horseman hatched last year but due to some limitating factors, I decided to do a Grim Reaper scene instead.
This year I finally got all my ducks in a row and the shoot is on. The action figure I used is a Marvel Legends Spider-Man Noir from the Marvel�s Lizard wave and horse by CollectA. As these two cannot be used out of the box as is� I used only the body of Marvel Legends Spider-Man Noir and cropped the head pegs off in Photoshop. For the horse, this horse originally was tan horse so I painted it black to fit this scene and the black makes this even more mean.
Some props I used to bring up the medieval look, they include a sword from Mattel Justice League Multiverse Wonder Woman figure. The pumpkin is a custom made piece that I been using for few years now� The tree that is in the frame is also a custom piece that used in few photoshoot in the past and it is one of favourite diorama piece too.
For lighting, I used three light source� One overhead room light (6w LED) bouncing off the ceiling, one Ulanzi Cube with few filter to get the desired color and my trusty old light bar� actually wanted two but misplaced the other so I improvised with just one. These two lights are just enough to put that creepy vibe and also giving some details to otherwise all black scene.
I tried few placement and finalised this scene by placing them side by side. Ulanzi cube was used for horseman�s rim light and light bar for the other side illumination, as it is placed so far they they just cast a bit of highlights only. As the background is coming from my MacBook Air, I need to have deflectors (with boxes and home stuffs) to cut reflection of the light on the background itself.
I used my Nikon D3100 DSLR with 55-200mm telephoto lens to shoot this beautiful shot. As my setup is relatively small so I used this telephoto lens to get some background compression and some cool bokeh. And the plan worked I got some background compression and also got the creepiness without overdoing. The photo right from the camera itself is great and I wanted give some Photoshop love�
As the photo came quite well, I did very minimal postproduction work in Photoshop. The bigger chunk of work is the fog and some color correction on the light casting. I also cropped out the head peg and added some reddish piece to make that black space a bit interesting. Overall I had fun, and this also challenged my skills in the lighting space. What do you think? Did I do well? Or you have some tips to make this even more realistic. For now go out and have fun playing �Trick or Treat� and have a wonderful Halloween. Till next time� Boo!
