For once I have this year's Halloween party photos ready before the actual date of Halloween... Sara and Diana, sadly, had to miss the party due to a conflicting Girl Scout event, but Timothy and I went and enjoyed the usual activities: crafts, races, playing on the playground and in the bounce house, parading and showing off costumes for the kids; conversing with each other and vaguely keeping an eye on their kids for the adults.

Timothy's lizard mask, predictably, didn't stay on for long. We had the usual assortment of princesses, superheroes, and commercial costumes, but also as usual some very creative and original home-made costumes; my favorite was the boy who showed up as a bunch of grapes (green balloons attached to his shirt).

Closing out the Halloween photos, this year's family jack-o-lanterns.

The technique I used for processing most of the later ones was a little unusual: I used Adobe Camera Raw (as I usually do, in part for its richer color and better shadow detail) but overlaid with the results of converting the same files with Canon's software, using a mask so that the Canon part was visible only in the overexposed highlights. Adobe was making those parts too solidly yellow, while Canon left more detail visible and used a softer white-yellow that I liked better. I've been overlaying two versions of the same photo reasonably often before, typically with greatly differing exposure compensation levels, to preserve highlight color and detail while correctly exposing the rest, but I think this is the first time I've done it with versions converted at the same exposure by two different pieces of software.

Here's the second half of my Halloween costume photos. These ones are from the annual party for kids in University Hills, the UCI faculty housing development in which I live.

A small sample:

I just added the first of two galleries of kids in Halloween costumes to my photo pages. These ones are from the Boo Bash, an annual event put on by the city of Irvine, with activity booths, costume contests, and a haunted house. Sara's friend Lee got called onstage to help a magician, and Sara stayed late with Lee's family to watch the "lawnchair theater" presentation of Halloweentown High. A good time had by all. This is the fourth year we've gone, I think; I still have photos online from the three previous years. I'm working on a similar number of photos from my neighborhood's Halloween party; I hope to finish them by this weekend sometime.

Some highlights:

Our annual pumpkin-hunting excursion to Tanaka Farms (aka Strawberry Farms).

The full gallery.