Monday, October 26, 2009

Pumpkins . . .again




Pumpkins. It started with a film camera (remember those), black and white film, a dark room in my bathroom, a faithful compadre's house with hay and cornstalks, a few friends and their kids dressed for fall, and of course, pumpkins, lots of pumpkins.

My first "fall photo shoot" in 2001 started with a desire to give my friends a fun fall photo of their kids or family with tinted pumpkins. It was a great success - lots of orders. The problem was I never anticipated the time it would take to hand develop each print, spray it, color tint each pumpkin with chalk pastels, and spray it again. I was up until the wee hours of the night just with the developing, while John and a college student were tinting them - it was crazy. All those beautiful, orange, round pumpkins that I kept throwing in each shot (seemed like a good idea at the time), were getting cursed at 1 am in the morning. I think I probably came out in the red for that shoot because of the amount of man hours it took to get a final tinted print!

So when the girls emailed me to take fall pictures . . .with pumpkins . . .I thought it would be fun. And it was. Except this time all I needed was my digital camera and Photoshop. . . .throw in pumpkins, lots of pumpkins, as many pumpkins as you want . . .not a problem!