The actual joy of Halloween is capturing yourself OR your own self-created creepy atmosphere to go along with what Halloween stands for. This is a bit close to what Katie thinks captures the spirit of Halloween for her, with as little time as possible spent on the photo editing, when she was putting the makeup on. She did the makeup herself.

The above photo is the result of the following extremely basic HDR settings I played with in Photomatix (which comes with some of the most advanced HDR tools on the planet), while working on the original:

• Reduced noise
• Histogram testing (played with the different Luminance, Red, Green and Blue Histogram settings)
• Focused on the Tone Compressor settings instead of the Details Enhancer

Of course, the above photo was what Katie thought portrayed the demise better. My original very basic HDR editing of her original photo was actually focused more on darkness than the redness.

This came from the original image also. With a touch of some very simple HDR techniques in Dynamic Photo HDR, the photo above came to be. That is a bit close to what I originally thought captured (in as little photo-work time as possible, of course) the Halloween spirit for her at that moment.

Here is the main bulk of what I played with very quickly to arrive at the above image:

• Reduced noise.
• Added clarity to the picture.
• De-hazed the areas.
• Changed the light radius, focusing on intensifying it on the right hand side.
• Made the surface texture a less smoth to the right edge and the left sides.

Both of these photos, of course, came from the original image that was taken within 5 seconds of Katie finishing her preliminary makeup and the associated costume. You can notice the blurriness a bit as my Sony Cybershot DSC-W80 choked in the very dark lighting. I hate using flash, so I enjoyed choking the camera. That is when you need to act like a mummy holding the camera if you want the blurriness to disappear altogether OR to at least be less noticeable.

The slaughtering continues, of course, as the above image itself was edited to include Hot Pixels Subtraction, resizing to 1024×768 pixels, and the caption embedding.

Happy Halloween!

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Electric Towers Fading Against The Sky.

Electric tower against the sky,
what are you doing?
You stand there flaunting,
where are you going?

The sky looks at you,
wondering why you cry?
You start gesturing back,
enabling civilization to survive?

No one comes near you,
for the fear of death by you.
Everyone wants the sky,
for the fear of mortality in you.

You are all alone in the deserts,
and in the backyards of those homes.
Your loneliness is hard to notice,
even though loneliness is in your bones.

So there you stand,
all alone and against the sky,
fading away with civilization,
wondering why no one else cries.

Location: Unknown. Somewhere in the Californian Deserts.

Also on BrightKite, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter and TwitPic.

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