Happy Halloween! We'll take a quick break from the TTV photography today and share a photo I took for Anya several months ago.

Technical Data: Canon EOS 7D, Canon EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 II at 33mm, 6.2 sec at f/4.6. ISO 200. No post production.

I guess a little back-story is in order for this photo. Anya does a lot of card making with rubber stamps - you can visit her blog for more detail and examples. Well, she is on what is called a Design Team for a stamp company called Waltzing Mouse Stamps, and basically they make cards and crafts with the company's stamps to help promote their products. Well, a few months back, they released a set of stamps with spooky Halloween style labels, so Anya ran with it and created a bunch of labels to put on bottles.

This then ended up turning into a full blown photo shoot setup. We experimented with multiple light sources - candles, small LED lights, small lamps, etc. We probably spent close to an hour trying different combinations and different angles and configurations of the bottles. We experimented with adding fake cobwebs and various props (yes, we actually do have a deer skull around the house - a couple actually... Anya has found them while out doing her field work). It was definitely the first time I did anything like this, and to be honest, it was kind of fun.

In the end, our efforts definitely resulting in a bunch of rather spooky looking photos. The owner of the stamp company really enjoyed them and used several of them to showcase the products on their site - that's probably the closest my photos have come to being published, so not too shabby. ;)

Anyway, have fun trick-or-treating, and definitely avoid anything that looks like it came from the shot above.

- Bill