Nice Photo of the Week – Raspberry | Nice Photography Magazine - The "Why To" Magazine about Creative Photography and Film Making

Nice Photo of the Week – Raspberry

Posted by Zeke Kamm on 5/12/08 • Categorized as Photo of the Week - ok, Month

Our first guest Nice Photo of the Week is by up and coming photographer Chris Barfield. It would seem this image was inspired by curiosity, which is as good a reason to make a photo as any. What he has produced is an image I personally find more fascinating than the sum of its parts. The image makes me think of insects and their egg sacks. Looking at any food from this close up calls to mind the idea from the novel Naked Lunch that we seldom share the level of intamicy with anything in life that we do with food the moment we look at it before putting it in our mouths. Combine that with something that shouldn’t be, but is translucent, and I can’t stop looking at this image. Here is Chris’s explination.

This image is a piece that came primarily out of
boredom, a feeling I often remedy by taking pictures
of whatever I can put together from my surroundings.
Earlier in the evening I had been working on some
images of normal raspberries, and for some reason it
occurred to me that raspberries might look pretty neat
if they were bleached. I got the supplies together and
left one raspberry in the bleach over night. The next
day, all of the color was gone from the berry, and
oddly enough was in the bleach. This clear berry was
floating in a glass full of magenta color bleach.

I took the berry out and started to devise a lighting
technique. I knew that I wanted it back lit to see the
seeds inside, but I also wanted some frontal
illumination to show the texture of the berry itself.
To accomplish this, I used two vivitar 285 hvs placed
in very close proximity to the berry, and just behind.
Having the lights in such close proximity to the berry
allowed me not only to back light it, but also to pick
up some specular reflections along the sides.In post
production, I brought the saturation down a tad bit to
add even more to the “sickly” feeling of it.