Got your attention?
Not just your average everyday sweet peppers, but twisted, warped into new forms which make them superbly photogenic. These are the ones I notice. You can eat any pepper, but these ones are special.
I picked up a couple of the mutants recently at Mestia’s main fruit and vegetable bazaar, the best place for such produce in the whole town. The seller knows me well and, as I was buying a lot of things from her, she threw in these two red ones I had noticed for free. I carefully stashed them in a protected place in the car, and drove home to Etseri.
Now, I’ll admit to having been drawn to the possibilities of odd peppers decades ago, seeing a gorgeous, mysterious, fascinating monochrome art print of some good specimens somewhere in a book when still in my youth as a photographer. It obviously impressed me enough that I never forgot it, and filed away the subject to attend to one day. Which has just come.
I didn’t want, or have, a proper studio setup. Just a simple background and available light would suffice: the former some wood floor planks and then the black faux leather cover of an office chair. No flash or light reflector; no oil or water spray, just the natural shine of the peppers’ skins. A 4/3-stop darkening of exposure, and a stepping down of aperture to around F8-10 for more depth of field (more of the subjects in focus).
I took 41 photos in less than half an hour: the two together and separate, from both sides and different angles. Towards the end, I took a breath and cut one of them in half along its length, splaying out the result to show its insides. Can’t undo that! There was lots of imagery suggesting human embryos, even twins. I wanted sculpture, that weirdness on a dark ground, which had startled me as a teenager.
Post-processing from the color originals, in Photoshop. I darkened the reds, lightened the greens and yellows, so that the reds and greens would not turn into the same shade of gray in monochrome. That was all; I copied the Black & White adjustment layer from the first image to each of the others, with tiny adjustments to the reds to not lose them either to solid blacks or to washed-out grays. Cropping the edges to have the peppers nearly fill each frame. Done, with a couple of favorites and a smooth progression from frame to frame showing how it started and ended and the steps in between.
I probably could have shot and edited the whole thing on my iPhone, but opted for the big Canon digital as I’m more used to its manual controls.
My wife, walking past the computer screen with one of the frames filling it, thought she saw snakes (which she cannot abide) from the corner of her eye. I smirked, not glad to have scared her, but pleased that something of the strangeness I was after had jolted her.
Just a pictorial experiment which had been brewing away in my mind’s eye for all these long years across several continents, until finally it all came together. How to take an unusual sample of a commonplace subject and shoot it simply to make a satisfying result? Start with inspiration from someone else; then imitate in your own style and make it wholly yours, as well as a tribute, I suppose.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
