Halloween and Pumpkin Patches: Phone Photo Tips for Parents

I’m not going to be at your pumpkin patch trip, and I’m definitely not following you around the neighborhood on Halloween night. Those photos are yours to take.

So here are the things that will genuinely improve them, in rough order of how much difference they make.

. Get Low for Better Halloween Photos

This is the whole ballgame. Almost every photo parents take of small children is shot from an adult’s standing height, looking down — which gives you the top of a head, a foreshortened body, and a lot of ground.

Crouch down to their eye level. That’s it. That’s the tip. Your photos will immediately look like someone else took them, because suddenly you’re seeing the kid’s world instead of looking down at it.

For a two-year-old in a pumpkin patch, that means sitting on the ground. Wear pants you don’t care about.

. Go early, and go on a weekday if you can

Pumpkin patches at 4 p.m. on a Saturday are wall-to-wall people and flat, harsh light. The same place at 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday is empty, golden, and about forty percent less stressful for everyone involved.

If you can only do a weekend, go right when they open.

. Put the sun behind them

Counterintuitive, I know. Everyone’s instinct is to face the kids into the sun, which produces squinting, harsh shadows under eyes, and a lot of complaining.

Turn them so the sun is behind or beside them and tap on their face to set the exposure. You’ll get soft light on the face and a nice glow through the hair. Your phone handles this far better than it did five years ago.

. Halloween night: get close, and kill the flash

Phone flash from fifteen feet away does nothing except make a small bright ghost in a dark frame. It has almost no range.

Instead:

• Shoot at dusk, not full dark. That window right after sunset when there’s still blue in the sky is the best light of the entire night. Get your costume photos then, before you leave the house.
• Use a porch light. Position the kid so a warm porch light or a lit window is falling on their face. Free, flattering, and it looks like Halloween.
• Have someone hold a second phone as a light, off to one side, about three feet away. This looks dramatically better than flash and costs nothing.
• Brace yourself against something. A fence, a car, a doorframe. Low light means slow shutter means blur, and steadying your arms fixes half of it.

. Use burst mode on anything that moves

Hold the shutter down. Kids running through leaves, jumping into a pile, sprinting up a driveway — you will not time that by hand. Fire twenty frames and keep one.

This is exactly what I do professionally. There’s no trick to it beyond taking more pictures than you think you need.

. Shoot the details, not just the faces

Everyone photographs the kid smiling in the costume. Almost nobody photographs the small hands gripping the pumpkin stem, the boots in the leaves, the zipper on the back of the dinosaur suit, the candy dumped out on the living room floor at the end of the night.

Those are the photos that will wreck you in fifteen years. They’re also the ones that make a photo book feel like a story instead of a lineup.

. Photograph the boring parts

The wagon ride. Buckling into the car seat in costume. The negotiation about which pumpkin. The exhausted kid asleep in face paint.

This is the same idea I wrote about in The photos you’ll treasure most aren’t the posed ones — the ordinary frames age far better than the ones where everybody said cheese.

. Get in the Picture with Your Kids

You are going to have four hundred photos of your kids from this fall and eleven of yourself. Hand your phone to your spouse, or to another parent, or set it against a fence post and use the timer.

Your kids will want photos with you, not just by you. I’ve said more about this in Get in the photo, mom.

And one genuinely dumb one

Wipe your lens. It lives in a pocket or a bag full of lint and fingerprints, and a smeared lens is the single most common reason phone photos come out hazy and low-contrast. Ten seconds on your shirt hem.

Where does your family go every year? I’m always looking for good patches around KC — tell me your spot in the comments.

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