Happy Halloween! Spooky Season with Dave Edkins

Happy Monday! It's the last Monday before Halloween, so for the Misuzu Monday Blog this week, I'm bringing Dave's edits from our Halloween shoot to you.

Last week, I did two posts with my edits and you can see Part I (sfw) here and Part II (nsfw) here. Dave's edits are very different to mine, and a lot more adventurous. I love how he edits and I hope you like these as much as I do. Dave shoots on a Nikon D850, and here are the images:

Little Red Riding Hood

The obvious place to start is with Little Red Riding Hood. This first image is one that I had also chosen to edit. I had to include it because not only did we both choose to edit the same image, we both decided to convert it to black and white too! I love that we both took very similar approaches to editing the same image. We both made the reds quite dark, but Dave chose a slightly tighter crop and kept more of the detail of the tree in the background.

Dave edited more of this set in monochrome than I did (which is unusual as I feel like I tend to do more black and white edits generally!) and here are two of my favourite monochrome edits. The first one, I love because it's so dark and almost looks like an old photograph. The second one looks more modern and spooky with the bluish hue, and definitely Halloweeny with the obscene amount of pumpkins!

One edit that I didn't include in the posts last week was one that I played around with from this set where I added in a moon. I didn't do it very well so I didn't bother to include it or show it to anyone. Dave is great at this, he's sent me some fabulous images where he's added in things he knows I like. My favourite examples are: when he put Pluto in a mirror reflection because he knows I'm still upset that he's 'not a planet anymore' *rolls eyes at the scientists*, and more recently, he added ships from Star Wars into the background of a bodyscape. Anyway, back to Red Riding Hood: the reason I loved this next edit is because although it's a million times better than the one I did, it's cool that we both independently edited a picture from this set in a similar way without talking about it at all. The second image here, Dave did because I told him I was playing around with selecting one colour to keep in a black and white image... so he went and did a better version. Rude. But, I love the image so I'll let him off.

Caution Tape

The set we did with the caution tape was about as glamour as I get in my modelling work but I thoroughly enjoyed shooting it and the images turned out great. These two edits of Dave's were my favourite, especially this first one with the light added in, it just makes the picture that much more awesome.

Spider

I didn't add any of the images with the big spider in my blog posts, but we had fun shooting them. Ultimately we chose not to do this set in the group shoots as it was difficult to get much variation... it turns out it's hard to balance fake spiders on your face/body without holding them so it made the shots very samey. Although we decided against having it as a set in the group shoots, I'm glad we still got a few pictures when we were messing around, because this one turned out pretty cool:

Morticia

I couldn't do a post without adding a shot of me with my best mate Herbert. This was the first edit that Dave sent to me after we shot and it is definitely one of my favourites:

Barn

This image is another one that both me and Dave chose to edit but this time, our edits are very different. Mine was kept in colour and quite bright, cropped to square, whereas Dave's edit is a darker one, converted to black and white, and he chose to keep more of the background in to show off the cobwebs... He also edited out the strand of hair across my knee that I'd kept in.

Blood

Finally, on to my favourite set. Blood. In my posts, I talked about making the bloody hands a feature of the images, and these two images do just that, but in a more obvious, and frankly, creepy way! I also like the eye contact with the camera on these images.

Dave's edit of me licking the blood off my hands is absolutely amazing, and gives off that Dexter vibe with the plastic sheet on the floor (in reality the plastic was just to stop us from getting banned from ARB for ruining the infinity curve!). The second image was one of a couple of shots we got very quickly at the end of the shoot to play around with moodier lighting. Considering it was a last minute 'let's take a shot and see before we pack up', I love that it produced a great image.

Bonus Image: Nude

Nothing to do with Halloween, but before I had slathered myself in fake blood, we tested the lights and I made Dave take a couple of shots because I loved the lighting for art nude. Although it's not relevant to the theme of this post, I wanted to put one in here so you can agree with me that the lighting is just lovely!

And that's all from me for this week. I hope you enjoyed checking out these images. Which set was your favourite? I'd also love to hear what you think we should include for our spooky season shoots next year!

A big than you to Dave for getting these edits done for me in time to write this blog post. I'm sure you'll agree that they are bloody amazing. If you'd like to see more of his work, here are his links:

Instagram

Threads

PurplePort

E-photozine

I wish you all a Happy Halloween, stay safe!

Misuzu x