The expertimental lense kit from Lomography has to be one your Christmas wish list and if not, add it! They range from standard, wide-angle and fish eye lenses, but on top of that you can take multiple exposures. So maybe you've been wanting to create a stack of double exposed photographs for a while now, well what are you waiting for. The reviews have said that you may not get the best quality but how about letting that creativity run wild for once. At a pretty reasonable price for $89, when typically a lens costs well over a couple of hundred dollars...this is a steal and a project.
I've been searching through the filters on Instagram...picking and choosing which ones are All Hallow's Eve worthy. The top five are Hudson, Earlybird, Brannan, Valencia and Sutro. For the long shadows and white casted sky, giving a more faded haunted illusion, Brannan has been deemed the 'Nancy Drew' of the mystery filters. And this filter works on almost anything from landscapes to carving a pumpkin with your kids. But if you are looking for a more turn of the century, classic filter...Earlybird is brilliant. Not only does it highlight the person's eyes (if it's a portrait) but the contrast is brought out more and slightly dims the brighter colors.
Good news! Instead of saving up and within a year or two you might be able to afford a fisheye lens. But if you can't wait, there is a solution. Photoshop CS4 has the capability to transform your regular 2D image into a rounded fisheye lens masterpiece. What impressed me most was that it did not distort the image or loose any pixelization of any kind. And there was none of that stretching that seems to make one side larger than the other, this was a balanced image that looked as if you had taken it with a fisheye lens.