Spadge wanted a necklace — things sort of spiralled out of control from there until we ended up with Bandit dressed like a dinosaur. Halloween a-side this was a fairly standard Saturday for us.

After watching Jurassic World back in the summer, the necklace that Claire (played by Bryce Dallas Howard) was wearing really caught Spadge’s eye. I tracked one down and sneakily bought it for her for finishing her book. When I gave it to her, she mentioned that I’d make a good Owen and then immediately started googling for dog dinosaur costumes…

It took me a couple of minutes but my brain finally caught up with hers and I knew we had our next photo concept.

We headed into the woods, at the start of golden hour on All Hallows’ Eve. The sun was being diffused by a thin layer of mist and looked amazing through the trees, creating an awesome silhouetted woodland scene. All I had to do was bring the detail out of the foreground with some lights.

To get the ambient light just right and keep the depth of field low I had to be up at 1/500th of a second even at ISO50. Hypersync to the rescue again. As soon as you go above  1/200th of a second you start dramatically losing effective power from your flashes, so I used the Westcott The Rapid Box Duo to mount two speedlights lights as my key. A 3rd gridded light with an orange gel gave a really nice rim light, highlighting Spadge’s light outfit awesomely.

What can I even say about Bandit. After putting the costume on it took us a few minutes to stop laughing. He loved running around the woods as a raptor. Stupid cute bastard.