Seattle Halloween

The camera stands on the path in the middle of the garden, and there is no street lighting in this at all - every bit of light in the panorama comes from burning torches staked into the lawn, a few coloured lamps, and the doorway. Directly ahead a covered porch has been curtained off and lit blue, with two figures in long period costume standing in it and a child in a white sheet going up the steps with a bucket. Off to one side a mummy stands full height between two torches, wrapped head to foot, close enough to the path that you would have to walk round it. The lawn has headstones and a white cross pushed into it and a skeleton laid out among the shrubs. Turn towards the street and there are more people coming, smeared into streaks by the long exposure, with ordinary lit houses carrying on behind them. Wet leaves everywhere underfoot.

This is one house on Capitol Hill on the evening of 31 October 2006. The front garden has been turned into a graveyard - crosses and headstones in the beds, a coffin propped by the steps, sheets hung from the porch rail - and a line of bamboo tiki torches runs from the pavement to the door. The figures under the portico are in costume and handing things out. So is the mummy standing at the bottom of the path.

Everything you can see is lit from inside the scene. There is no flash and no street lighting to speak of: the torches, a spotlight buried in the flowerbed, the porch bulbs and the windows of the houses along the block are doing all of it, which is why the sky reads as properly black and why the further end of the street dissolves. The people are blurred because the exposures were long. On a night like this that is not a fault, it is what the night looked like.

Capitol Hill is where Seattle goes for Halloween. It is one of the oldest and densest parts of the city, close-packed timber houses with deep porches and short front gardens, which is close to ideal for the purpose - enough room to build something, close enough together that a whole street can be walked in an hour.