We got a whole bunch of hot chili peppers in from our CSA, and I wanted to take a picture of them. I got the idea to arrange them so they looked like a flower, and this is the result:
1/80s, f/7.1, ISO-200, 50mm
This was lit by an on-camera flash bounced off the ceiling at high power.
I don’t like doing this kind of photography very often — it’s way too much work to set everything up! It also required a fair bit of retouching in postprocessing to get the effect I wanted, but I’m pretty happy with the end result.
Edit – for the curious, here is the original shot:
And here is a bit better view of my setup:
4 Comments
Oh cool! How did you get it so isolated? What’s the flower sitting on/backdrop?
The peppers are bound together with twist-ties by their stems, and then taped to a greeting card that has been turned inside out to catch the shadow. I then put down white paper everywhere to get a uniform white background, and photoshopped out the annoying lines and so forth.
See above (I edited the post) for pictures of the setup.
Oh wow, that is involved. Why the greeting card, instead of just placing the pepper on the ground? Hard to picture the difference.. maybe I’ll just have to try this, too. 🙂
My original vision was to shoot upwards at the peppers for a more dramatic effect, but I didn’t end up liking the way any of those shots turned out. Also, because of the stems, the peppers wouldn’t lie on the ground particularly easily — I think they’d need some kind of base or support.