In the words of the inimitable Anne Shirley, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers!” The weather, the colors, the scents and the sounds – it all comes together to create a month filled with opportunity for me and my camera.

Here at the Sweet Shoppe, we’re spending each month of 2024 with a Baker’s Dozen of photo prompts to ensure we’re being purposeful about recording this sweet life we live. So here are thirteen new prompts to inspire your photography in the coming month.

October’s Photo Prompts:

A Little Inspiration…

This month, I thought it would be fun to take a deeper look at several of the prompts and talk about different ways you can approach them.

After all, your experience of this month will vary depending on whether you have small children in your life versus teenagers, or if you only spend time around other adults. Your photo opportunities will differ based on the climate where you live, whether you’re traveling this month, or if you’re staying primarily indoors. But the beauty of the Baker’s Dozen prompts is that they’re pretty open ended. They’re intended as some initial inspiration to start you thinking about what photos you might shoot during the month, and you can interpret them in whatever way works best for you. Allow me to demonstrate with a few ideas from my camera to help get you started:

Changing Colors

In the northern hemisphere, October is the first true month of autumn. When we talk about “changing colors” this time of year, we’re usually referring to the leaves on deciduous trees. But depending on where you live, whether you had a wet or dry summer, and whether there’s been high winds, the leaves either may not be changing color yet or they might immediately die and fall off the trees. And if you’re in the southern hemisphere where it’s spring rather than autumn, your “changing colors” might mean flowers that are beginning to bloom. So here are three different ways you could interpret this prompt:

Find a tree with leaves that are changing color and snap a photograph. Try an unusual angle, like standing beneath the tree and shooting up against the sky.

Look for flowers rather than leaves – either outdoors or in a fresh bouquet – and snap a shot. This is a perfect excuse to treat yourself to some fresh-cut flowers! It doesn’t have to be expensive (I grabbed these for $10 at the grocery store) and it’ll give you a happy little boost of serotonin.

You can also look outside the natural world for “changing colors”. I spotted an old gas tank that was rusting away, the layers of yellow and red enameled paint giving way to bare metal and rust. When you start looking at your surroundings with an eye to this prompt, you’ll be surprised what you notice!

Pumpkin

With Halloween coming up at the end of the month, October is when we begin seeing pumpkins everywhere. There are several ways you can capture an image of a pumpkin this month.

If you have children in your life, get a kid-size pumpkin they can hold. For some reason, tiny pumpkins make littles laugh, and you can create some really sweet images with them.

Is there a pumpkin patch, fall festival, or botanical garden near you? Sometimes we have to create opportunities for photos by doing something outside of our normal routine – so take a couple hours to visit one of these places near you and bring your camera along. Where I live, the Dallas Arboretum does an annual “Autumn at the Arboretum” where they bring in over 100,000 pumpkins, gourds, and squash and decorate the heck out of the grounds. Its where I captured this shot of my best friend’s son trying to pick up a ginormous pumpkin:

Kids aren’t the only ones who can get their photo taken with a pumpkin. If you have a fur-baby in your life, why not create an autumnal portrait for them? Bonus points if they’re small enough to fit inside the pumpkin!

If all else fails, whip out your phone while you’re at the grocery store and snap a shot of their gourds. It doesn’t have to be difficult!

Costume

With Halloween fast approaching, you’ll definitely have opportunities this month to photograph a costume. It can be as easy as snapping a pic of a child trying on their Halloween costume:

To amp up the photo, ask your subject to move. Here, I asked my best friend’s daughter to walk towards me up the front path and show me her “superpower”. Make sure your camera is in shutter-priority or action mode so you can freeze the action! I like to shoot at 1/250s if the light will let me.

If your kids have outgrown the whole Halloween costume thing, think a little outside the box. Are they part of a team that wears a uniform? That could absolutely work for this prompt! Here, I recorded a shot of my stepdaughter in her drill team uniform one Friday night at a game.

Foliage Close-Up

You’ve already captured a shot of changing colors, but now it’s time to get closer. Pull out your macro lens (or put your camera into macro mode) and create an image with the close-up detail of some kind of foliage. Start by looking up:

You can also look down:

And you’re free to get a little loose with your interpretation of “foliage”. If nuts and seeds are falling from the trees, try capturing them instead:

Open Flame

Let me start by saying you should always put safety first – for your photo subjects, for your photography equipment, and for yourself – but open flames can create some absolutely gorgeous images. Where will you see a fire this month? Perhaps you’ll begin using your indoor fireplace or an outdoor chiminea this season:

You can always light up a candle for a happy little burst of warmth and scent:

Or perhaps you’ll find or create the opportunity for a bonfire. Photos shot after dark in front of the flames can have dramatic light and shadows:

You’ll want to crank up your ISO (I shot these at 6400) and change your metering mode to spot metering. That will help you expose for the lighted areas and not an average across the whole image. You want the areas beyond the fire to stay black like this:

Hobby

You can use this prompt to chronicle the hobby of someone else in your life, but I’d like to challenge you to focus on yourself instead. Whether you scrapbook or sew, quilt or crochet, do diamond painting or cross-stitch or photography – if it’s something you’re passionate about, it should be recorded. Here are three ways you can capture an image of your hobby.

Hand a camera off to someone else and ask them to photograph you in action as you engage with your hobby. My husband has gotten really good about snapping pics of me while I work a photo shoot:

You can photograph the tools and supplies you use for your hobby:

Or why not create a self portrait with the help of a tripod and a timer?

Night Photography

In the northern hemisphere, we’ve already begun the march toward shorter days and longer nights. So why not take advantage of the earlier sunset and play with a little night photography? Here are three ideas for you to try.

Turn your camera up to the sky and capture a pic of the moon. You don’t need much in the way of special equipment beyond a tripod and a zoom lens. I shot this with a 200mm zoom:

Halloween often means yard decorations. Whether it’s jack-o-lanterns, luminarias, or more elaborate lighting displays, crank up your ISO and grab a couple shots:

Or what about shooting a quick portrait after dark? My husband and I were walking out to the car after a football game when I noticed the play of light and shadow across his face from the overhead lights.

Facial Expression

I think this might be my favorite prompt this month! Who can you get to make a silly face? Or a scary one? Excited, or just plain goofy? Sometimes it takes a little prompting and coaching to encourage your subject, but images like these are always fun. For this shot, I told Tegan, “Show me your excited face!”

This one took absolutely no prompting – we just asked my granddaughter Evie to smile, and she turned the sassy sweetness up to 11:

One of my favorite tricks for shots like these is to have another adult (or older child) standing over my shoulder, prompting the child to make different faces. My older niece told her sister to “make your lemon face” and I captured this gem:

And sometimes, depending on the child, it takes a zoom lens and some patience. Samuel is on the spectrum and in these early days, getting him to pose for the camera could be a challenge. But instead of trying to direct the action, I sat back and let his Uncle Jim goof off and play with him. It took a little while for him to loosen up, but I was ultimately able to capture his sweetest little scrunchy face!

When it comes to photography, I firmly believe if a child won’t work with you, then you work with them.

Join us (you could win a free kit!)

I hope you’ll play along with this month’s Baker’s Dozen of photo challenges. Remember, it’s all about being more purposeful about our photography and capturing more images in 2024. And the prompts can be as flexible as you need them to be!

As always, I encourage you to share your finished images where you feel comfortable doing so. If you post them on social media, use the hashtag #ssdphotochallenge – and when you scrapbook them, be sure to share your completed layout with us in the Gallery.

We’ve also set up a thread in the SSD Challenges forum for everyone to share their images – and as a bonus, for each photo you post, your name will go in a drawing and one person will win their choice of a kit or template trio or quad from the Shoppe! Congratulations to Leah, aka immaculeah, our winner for the month of September.

Who will be next to win their choice of goodie from the Shoppe? It could be you when you join us in the forum in this thread for October and start sharing your Baker’s Dozen images now. I’ll see you there!