We took Jason trick-or-treating for the first time this year, with some friends and their kids. Neither of us were sure how it would go, whether he'd have fun or whether he'd fall apart quickly. The previous times we'd put him in his costume, he started taking it off again within minutes, so we didn't expect much. Turns out, he loved it. After the first couple of houses he was pulling us along down the street, running up to each door and shouting "Trick or treat!" before he even got up the driveway. By the time we were halfway around the block his pumpkin bucket was too heavy for him to carry, but he still kept going. What's more, he kept his costume on the whole time. It was a lot of fun.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 35mm f/1.8 DX lens, in manual exposure mode. Aperture f/1.8, shutter 1/125, ISO 1600. Post-processing in Aperture 3: cropped and rotated; daylight WB preset; curve for contrast, tone, and highlight recovery; burned the background.

Thoughts for improvement: I'd be interested to see what this would look like on a camera with better high-ISO performance and a higher resolution. (Though, if I'd taken a step forward I could have saved some pixels and not had to crop.) I'd also like to see what it would look like with sharper focus. Still, the grainy look from the high-ISO noise and the softness give it a kind of retro look, which I tried to enhance with the white balance and tone. I think it works relatively well. The only thing that kind of bugs me is the way that the bucket is out of focus, which is due to the wide-open aperture. If I had a camera with better low-light performance, I might have been able to get this at f/2.8 or maybe even f/4, which would have kept the whole subject in focus.