Happy belated Hallowe'en everybody. Believe it or not, this is the FIRST Jack'o'Lantern I have ever carved. He adorned our brand new front porch last night for the Hallowe'en festivities and we even got a compliment about him.
In order to get some shots of Jack lit from within by a candle, I got out my mini tripod and started taking shots at various aperture and shutter speed settings to see what would work best. Needless to say, as I fiddled with the camera, the evening darkness also grew denser so it turned into quite a challenge.
The top photograph is the first one I took. It's got an aperture of about f4.5 with a shutter speed around four seconds. It's a good, crisp picture but I wanted to see if the flickering flame of the candle could be more visually interesting with a smaller aperture and a longer exposure.
The lower shot was taken under much darker conditions and with a 15 second exposure. This resulted in a dark photo (no matter how long you made the exposure, there just wasn't much light) so that Jack's face stands out better but the slower shutter didn't seem to do much with the flickering flame. My guess is that the light from the candle was already diffused as it passed through the carved features of Jack's face, so that, even if the flame itself moved while the shutter was open, it made no difference to what the camera saw and captured. The question of course is: which photo do you like better?
