Halloween is a great holiday for photography. Kids parade the streets in colorful costumes, decorative lights add an eerie glow to the neighborhood, festive decorations adorn houses, and groups of trick or treaters await the eager photographer ready to capture the festivities. Costume clad kids become the centers of attention as parents across the US help apply make-up, adjust a mask, engineer a make shift prop, or simply sit back and watch their kids undergo transformations from their normal beings only to be recognized by their voices. These are the moments for which photography was created.

The majority of Halloween pictures are made after dark necessitating the use of flash or high ISO settings. Flash works well if the action is fast and you need to freeze the moment. If there's a significant amount of ambient light in your home, setting the ISO on your digital camera to 800 will allow you to capture natural light shots. Light from a flash creates natural color while pictures lit with incandescent bulbs give the image an orange / yellow hue which may act to enhance the scary colors of Halloween.

A photographic technique I like to use for Halloween shots is slow shutter synch with flash. In the accompanying image of my son next to the jack-o-lantern, I used a one second exposure to record the candlelight inside the pumpkin along with the lights inside the house. During the exposure I intentionally moved the camera creating the blurs of light. The reason my son is sharply recorded is I had him hold still during the exposure. The flash fired at the end of the one second exposure and recorded the sharp detail in the image.