Monday 6 October 2008 : Halloween scarecrow

Halloween is coming, and the decorations have already been taken out. There are a dozen of these in the kitchen.

Believe it or not, but this picture was taken with the built-in flash from less than a metre distance. I tried a simple trick that I picked up from my photo geek friends: put a piece of white paper in front of the flash, under an angle, so that most of the light bounces off to the (white) ceiling. This gives the beautiful diffuse light you see in the picture, instead of the harsh highlights and shadows normally resulting from the internal flash.

After that, postprocessing consisted only of a few subtle adjustments.