Superheroes and monsters

A moment of solitude and focus before the party. This is my favorite shot from the evening.

I shot at the Superhero Halloween party organized by Superheroes against cancer last weekend. It was a fun shoot. When you shoot at an event you have little control, but you can still plan and prepare.

I showed up early, about half an hour before the event, to check out lighting and talk a with the lighting people. I took some test shots, and experimented a bit with the ambient lighting. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to try out:

• I knew I would need flash, but I did not want to knock out the ambient lighting. My idea was to  use relatively long shutter times and large apertures (small aperture numbers) to let in as much light as possible in the camera. By putting the flash on 2nd curtain, I figured I'd be able to freeze foreground subjects with a relatively weak (underexposed by 0.7 to 2.3 stops, depening on the distance to the subject) flash.
• Halloween and superpowers, so I wanted to shoot ghosts and supers moving at super speed. I knew I could do that by dragging the shutter. That means I used extremely long shutter times, often between 0.5s and a full second. I made sure to take a number of shots at shorter shutter times too, to get a number of more normal pictures.

It turned out pretty well. Everyone had a blast at the event, and I got some pretty good event photos.

Superman moving in on Lois Lane using super speed.

Bloody Mary, anyone?

This guy stayed in costume all night. That is, I do hope he was in costume...

Cat woman attacked by ghost. Will she make it?

Hockey, anyone?

Join me for a drink?

These people kick ass!

It was a target rich environment!

Medic! Wait, no, another medic...please!

Fortunately, Cat woman survived the ghost attack.

Dead girl dancing.

Are you afraid? You will be...

I was photographing this beautiful woman, when suddenly, a vampire materialized and attacked.