The spookiest day of the year is upon us and it might have you in the mood to create something frightful. Photoshop, of course, offers nearly limitless creative opportunities to scare your social media followers, but what if you'd rather create something horrifying using practical effects rather than digital?
Photographer Felix Hernandez, whose photo series featuring "The Love Car" changed his life, takes us behind the scenes to show how he created a spooky pumpkin using (mostly) practical effects in this article and the accompanying video.
The final fiery pumpkin image is something that could be straight out of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and, while Hernandez used Adobe Photoshop to blend together several images, it's incredible how much of the image was created in real life and in-camera. As we see so often in film, practical effects often trump digital effects for believability and Hernandez's photo is no exception.
The image took just four shots to create and with some blending and color grading in Photoshop, Hernandez achieved an image that could be used on a horror film poster.
Felix Hernandez combined four images to create his terrifying pumpkin.
Have you created any Halloween-themed images lately? Drop a comment below and let us know if you used practical or digital effects to achieve your image.
Images and video used with permission of Felix Hernandez.
Here is a postcard I created couple of weeks ago.I used Photoshop to create the overall composition and a little bit of Illustrator for type treatment.
This was created only with lights and a long exposure.