How to do the pumpkin head trend photoshoot (real pumpkin vs AI)

Every October the same picture takes over TikTok and Instagram: someone in a cozy fall outfit, sitting on a hay bale or standing in a dark studio, with a carved jack-o-lantern where their head should be. It's called the pumpkin head trend (or pumpkin head photoshoot), it has been around since about 2020, and it comes back every Halloween because it looks great and needs no costume.

We tried it from two directions: the real-pumpkin way, and an AI way that we ended up building into a small tool, Pumpkin Head Studio. Here is what we learned about both, so you can choose.

Option 1: the real pumpkin

Picking and carving

• Size matters more than shape. You need a pumpkin your whole head fits inside, with a little room for your shoulders. Look for one around 30–40 cm (12–16 in) across. Bring a measuring tape to the patch. It will feel ridiculous, and you'll still be glad you did.
• Cut the hole from the bottom, not the top. The opening has to go over your head, so cut a wide circle in the base, then scoop everything out. Scrape the walls thin (about 2–3 cm), or it gets heavy fast.
• Carve the face last, and keep it classic. Triangle eyes and a jagged grin read best on camera. Fancy carvings disappear in photos.
• Ventilation and sight. You see through the eye holes. That's fine for posing and not fine for walking around, so have someone guide you.
• Light it safely. Put an LED tea light or a small battery puck light inside, taped to the wall above eye level. Never use a real candle on your head.

Outfit and setting

• Neutral, textured clothes work best: cream knit sweaters, denim, flannel, a long coat. The pumpkin is the color accent, so the outfit shouldn't compete with it.
• Two classic backdrops:
  1. Pumpkin patch or field at golden hour: low sun behind you, warm and dreamy.
  2. Dark studio: a black sheet or a dark wall, one lamp to the side, and the pumpkin's own glow. This is the moody, editorial version.
• Props: a bouquet of dried flowers, a mug, a stack of books, or a second, smaller pumpkin in your hands.

Poses that work

• Sitting on a stool or hay bale, hands resting on your knees, very still. Stillness is what makes it eerie.
• Head tilted slightly. Even a small tilt reads as "alive" through a carved face.
• Couples: sit side by side, both in pumpkins, and hold hands, or face each other.
• Pets: the dog doesn't wear a pumpkin, and that's fine. The dog sitting next to a pumpkin-head human is half the charm.

Shooting tips

• Shoot at dusk, or in a dark room, so the glow from inside shows.
• Use a tripod and the self-timer, or a friend. Burst mode helps, because the pumpkin wobbles.
• Lock exposure on the pumpkin, not the background. The carved face is your subject.

Total cost: a pumpkin ($15–40 depending on where you live), an LED light, about an hour of carving and some cleanup.

Option 2: the AI version (one photo, no carving)

If you don't have a pumpkin patch nearby, or you want the look for a photo you already have, you can do it with an image-editing model instead. We made a small web app for exactly this, a pumpkin head trend generator, and building it taught us a few things about getting the result right.

What makes a good input photo

• Full-body or waist-up, one person, facing the camera. The model only replaces the head, so your outfit and pose are the whole picture.
• Decent light on your clothes. A dark, blurry phone photo gives a dark, blurry pumpkin.
• No group shots. One subject at a time works much better.

The prompt details that mattered

If you want to try this with any image-edit model, these three phrases made the biggest difference:

1. "worn like a mask": without it, the model sometimes puts a pumpkin next to the person, or on their lap.
2. "keep the same body, pose, outfit and hands": without it, it "helpfully" restyles your clothes.
3. "family-friendly, no text": it keeps the result clean and stops it from writing random words on the pumpkin.

Pets work too: the dog's head becomes a small jack-o-lantern and the fur stays the same.

Making it move

For a short clip, you can feed the finished image to an image-to-video model. Two rules kept it from going wrong:

• Ask for gentle motion only: a slight turn toward the camera, the carved face flickering like candlelight, a few leaves drifting. Big movements make the pumpkin warp.
• State plainly that the head stays a carved pumpkin for the whole clip and never shows a human face. Otherwise the model sometimes "removes the mask" halfway through, which is creepy in the wrong way.

Which should you choose?

• Real pumpkin if you love the process, have a patch nearby and a friend with a camera. The photos have a handmade feel nothing beats.
• AI if it's the night before Halloween, you're far from a pumpkin patch, or you want to try a pumpkin head photoshoot with your pet without stuffing them in a gourd.

Either way, post it as a carousel. Put the moodiest shot first, and use the trend's usual song ("Oh Klahoma" by Jack Stauber is the classic) from the app's sound library.

Happy Halloween 🎃

The example images in this post are AI-generated. The people in them are fictional, made for illustration.