Seattle Halloween

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.