Halloween Pet Portraits: Ten Ideas That Actually Photograph Well

Halloween is the one night of the year when dressing an animal up is socially permitted, and most people waste it. They buy a costume that photographs as a shapeless bundle, take one picture in a dark hallway, and it goes nowhere.

Two separate problems: what the costume does on the animal, and what the camera does to the costume. Here is what survives both.

What photographs well and what does not

Three rules, and they explain almost every disappointing Halloween pet photo.

The face has to stay visible. Anything with a hood, a mask or a large head-piece hides the only part anyone actually wants to see. The best costumes are worn from the neck down and leave the face entirely alone.

Silhouette beats detail. A camera at any distance reads shape before it reads texture. A costume with a strong outline — a ruff, wings, a hat with a defined edge — reads instantly. A costume made of intricate detail turns to mush.

Halloween is dark, and dark is the enemy. The single biggest reason these photos fail is light, not costume. Take the picture indoors near a window during the afternoon rather than outside at nine at night.

Ten that work

1. A ruff collar. One piece of pleated fabric round the neck. Instantly Elizabethan, leaves the face clear, costs almost nothing and reads perfectly at any distance. The best value on this list by a distance.
2. Bat wings. Strong silhouette, sits on the back, nothing near the head. Works on cats, who will otherwise remove anything you put on them.
3. A tiny witch's hat. Held on by a chin strap, sits at an angle, and the angle is the joke. Get the small one rather than the big one.
4. A pumpkin collar. Orange, round, obvious. Works on animals who tolerate no clothing whatsoever, which is most cats and a surprising number of dogs.
5. A cape. Vampire or wizard. Fastens at the neck, flows behind, and creates the outline that makes a photograph read at a glance.
6. A bow tie and nothing else. The minimalist option. A dignified animal in one formal accessory is funnier than the same animal in a full outfit, because the restraint implies the animal chose it.
7. Flower crown, but black. Gothic without being a costume. Photographs beautifully on long-haired cats and on anything white.
8. A small cauldron or basket as a prop. Not worn at all — placed beside them. Zero tolerance required, and props solve the problem for animals who will not wear anything.
9. A skeleton print bandana. The lowest-commitment option that still reads as Halloween in a photo.
10. Nothing at all, on black. A black cat photographed against a dark background with one strong side light is more genuinely Halloween than any costume, and it is free.

Getting the animal to tolerate it

Put the costume on the floor for a day first, so it stops being a new object. Put it on for thirty seconds and take it off again before there is any reaction, then repeat. Photograph on the third or fourth attempt rather than the first.

And accept the limit: some animals will not do this, and pushing it produces a photograph of a miserable animal, which is not the picture anyone wanted. The prop options exist for exactly this reason.

Taking the photo

Everything in the nine rules for photographing your pet applies, with two Halloween-specific additions.

Shoot in daylight even though it is Halloween. Afternoon, near a window. Nobody looking at the photograph knows what time it was taken.

Include some of the costume, not all of it. Head, shoulders and the top of whatever they are wearing. A full-body shot puts the face too far away, and the face is the point.

The portrait version

The other approach is to skip the costume entirely and have the animal illustrated in one instead — which sidesteps every tolerance problem, works on animals who will not wear a bandana for four seconds, and produces something that hangs on a wall in November rather than living in a camera roll.

It also allows things a real costume cannot: a cat as a gothic countess in a cobwebbed hall, a dog as a Victorian ghost. Our Halloween collection is built on the same logic as the royal portraits — the comedy comes from how seriously the picture takes itself — and if you want the reasoning behind that, it is here.

One practical note if you go that route: order in the first half of October. Artwork reaches you to approve in two to three business days and ships one to two after you approve it, and late October is the busiest fortnight of our year.

Whichever way you go, the photograph you start from decides the result — see what actually makes a good portrait.