Unusual

Over the years I've photographed a very wide and diverse range of things and places and a question that I'm often asked is "what's the most unusual thing you've photographed?" My answer always starts by saying that within the context of the job, nothing is unusual. If a company manufactures Wear-Once Disposable Paper Knickers (yes, really), then producing product shots is not unusual as that is what the company does. Other occasions where the items may at first seem unusual are a ceramic bladed kitchen knife, an art installation made entirely from carrots and the exterior of the house in Chester where Keith 'Orville' Harris grew up.

In all cases, the photographs were produced for a specific client requirement but there have been occasions when the photography could be classed as being of something unusual and this is one example.



The brief was to illustrate a play on words between E-coli and Cauli and the idea was to produce a photograph of a whole cauliflower in a way that would make it look sinister. The black background and dark shadowy lighting has become a style used throughout a series of images and each is photographed in a similar way. There are no fancy expensive lighting rigs, no delicately balanced pieces of mirror and no lights flagged with patterned gobos.

The lighting consists of a Maglite torch with a tightly focussed spot beam, a long exposure and the camera on a tripod. The final image consists of 5 or 6 different files, all perfectly in register, with each containing a section of cauliflower 'painted' with the torch during a 6 second exposure. The files are simply blended together in Photoshop to create an image with overall balanced lighting.

The technique is very simple and straightforward although it takes many attempts to get a feel for how the light works on various areas of the subject. It works best on items that have a delicate surface texture to enable deep shadows to reveal the shapes.



As is often the case, it's the simple ideas that are most successful and I now regularly pack a torch as part of my studio lighting kit. The photo of the hippo skull was produced in exactly the same way.