Monster House Lives!!!

note: click the pictures to see more detail

Every year about this time Monster House rises from the depths.

(The most viewed entry of all time on my blog is last year's picture of Monster House.)

What good is Halloween without real spider webs adorning your house (inside and out.) I love to see the perfection (and the unique, custom imperfections) in a carefully spun web--the details are fascinating to me.

Nothing says, "Where's the fresh Hot Apple-Cinnamon Cider" better than the warm glow a Jack=o=lantern on a crisp, see-your-breath, fall night with leaves crunching under your feet.



Spring and Fall are my favorite times of the year: bright new colors spring-up all over the place!


You can't have fall without Candy Corn made with sweet honey!

Monster House

Last year we learned that our house turns into Monster House around Halloween time. Although narrowly escaping with our lives intact, we were successful in snapping a few pictures:

Halloween: Great For Pictures

Halloween is one of the most artistic holidays of the year: Pumpkin Carving, make-up, costumes, decorations, haunted yards and houses.... Halloween also provides some good picture-taking opportunities.

Here are a few pictures from previous years in an attempt to give you some ideas for your photographic experiments this year:

Jack-o-lanterns are great fun to photograph without a flash. I found if you throw-in a few three-point lighting componants, it adds some pretty cool affects. Note the right-side glow on the pumpkins from the inside light shining through the window with a dash of white shine on the top left (from an LED flashlight). All done with a tripod and no-flash to show the glow from within the pumpkins. Its cool just having the faces glow in blackness, too.

If you want to see some real pumpkin carvings, check out the gallery at the Pumpkin Gutter website.

The macro feature did a great job with these autumn-colored Candy Corns...one of our seasonal favorite foods. This makes a good desktop backdrop.

Monster house comes to life in the dark (no flash). [But I did have to use photo software to brighten the picture up enough to see the glowing features clearly.]

As the fall temperatures shrink, dew beautifies spider webs in shiny diamond beads.

Unfortunately, no amount of diamond dew makes spiders attractive to me.