Halloween hooligans

After having a lot of fun making some portraits of the characters at last year's Halloween party, I decided to definitely do it again this year. Apple's "Cheeeeeese" commercial for the new panorama feature in iOS6 gave me the idea to try to shoot them all on white and make one big panorama-style composite.

Between the tips from the Strobist Lighting In Layers DVD and Zack Arias' detailed white seamless tutorial, I was armed with just enough info (and Home Depot tile boards) to be dangerous. Here is a little behind-the-scenes look at the setup which ran diagonally across the longest part of the garage. It still wasn't quite long enough to overcome the lights bouncing off of the low ceiling, but we made do and had a blast in the process.

And the bonus - after the photos were taken, the two stands & crossbar holding up the white paper background were repurposed to dangle donuts from with twine for the much anticipated hands-free donut eating competition! The fully extended 12-foot crossbar easily handled 5 hanging donuts at a time.

Strobist info: The key light is an SB-600 with a 1/4 CTO gel in a gridded homemade beauty dish from high camera right, zoomed to 24mm and fired at 1/2 power. The background white seamless was lit with an SB-800 to camera right and an SB-25 from camera left, zoomed to 50mm, and fired at 1/4 power. Shot as individual portraits on 1/2-width seamless, composited together in post.