Photography can be incredibly complex—but it doesn’t have to be. I’ve always been fascinated by the colors, textures, and delicate forms of vegetables. They are perfectly designed and often incredibly beautiful. For this shot, all I wanted was a simple cutaway of a red pepper that showed all it’s parts: stem, flesh, interior structures, and seeds. Here’s the setup:
- Object: one red pepper, sliced about 1/3 of the way through
- Backdrop: black muslin
- Support: I balanced the pepper against a clamp
- Backl ight: a headlamp balanced on a roll of tape and aimed dead-center at the back of the pepper (as a continuous light source that produced the soft, inner glow)
- Key light: A 24″ x 24″ softbox directly over the camera, about two feet above the pepper, and aimed down at about a 45-degree angle
- Exposure: in order to capture the ambient light from the headlamp, I had to reduce my normal synch speed of 1/160 to 1/25, aperture was set at f/9, two-second timer, Strobepro M60 speedlight set at 1/8th power
- Sequence: I made a very simple, three-image focus stack to make sure that the seeds were in perfect focus (I didn’t care if things got a bit soft toward the back).
- Camera and lens: Pentax k-3, 100mm 2.8 macro
The post processing was simple as well:
- Open all images in Camera Raw, make all my normal corrections and tweaks (white balance, highlights and shadows, etc.)
- Open again in Photoshop as stacked files (aligned and focus-blended), mask out background, make additional corrections, repairs, and tweaks, merge, sharpen, and export as color and black and white versions. Oh, and I inverted the color version because it just looked really cool that way.
And that’s it. Total shooting and processing time was just about an hour.
I love simply beautiful things.
