by hellodearphotographer

Thriller Halloween inspiration | Feature by Nicole Bergeson

Tell us about the concept behind this creative thriller shoot?

Beth Easton of Seasalt and Evergreens organized a loop group on Instagram and invited me to be part of it. Each month the group takes music inspired photos to post in the loop. Our October theme was “Thriller”.  My friend April Christopher and I collaborated on this shoot and got all of our kids together to dress as zombies and party down to some Michael Jackson. She lives in the country and has this super long, kind of spooky driveway so we decided to do the shoot there and it was perfect. I watched the music video and was especially inspired by the dance scene with the zombies in an alleyway and knew I wanted to sort of recreating that in some way.

We love all of the artificial and dynamic light used, how difficult was it to shoot from your normal light use.
She and I are both natural light photographers and both sort of minimalists when it comes to gear so this was out of the box for both of us. After watching the music video for Thriller, I knew I wanted to do the shoot at night, so I suggested that we use car headlights, we put the kids out there and took a few shots but the light wasn’t exactly what we’d hoped for so we parked our cars facing each other and put the kids between them so that they were lit from the front and back. We also turned on the lights above her garage for sort of a spotlight effect to make it look like a movie set. We enlisted the help of her husband, who used Atmosphere Aerosol to spray in front of the headlights for the fog. It was truly a team effort!
Working with children is always fun but can you give us some tips to help them have a better experience

Make it FUN for them and let them feel like they have some control. When I talk about things with my kids first and let them give ideas and input they feel more involved and are ultimately more cooperative, and they have GREAT ideas sometimes so it’s a win for both of us! April’s kids and mine have grown up together so they are always down to hang out! We showed them the Thriller video and watched other Micheal Jackson music videos before the shoot so they thought it was cool. We played the song while we did the session and that totally helped them get into character. We directed and posed them for a bit but once it was clear that they were done with that we just sprayed fog and played music and let them dance and play together and photographed that!

What presets were used to edit these

I used Tricia Victoria presets (with a few tweaks) to edit all the color photos, specifically TVP 3. For the black and white conversions, I used Forged Presets.

 

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ABOUT THE ARTIST :

I’m a Lifestyle photographer living in Eugene, Oregon with my Husband and our three sweet little girls (the three sisters, for which my business is named).

INSTAGRAM | WEBSITE 

Find April’s work here : INSTAGRAM 

Beth Easton work : INSTAGRAM 

 

 

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