Instructor: “Okay photogs, post about how your photography is going and any “ah ha!” or “oh no!” moments you have. Focus on sharing your work flow and software/camera used and what you’re learning about that.”

Me: “Wow. This is hard, and it takes a lot of time, and I appreciate a good photograph(er) more than ever.”

I borrowed Marlboro’s Canon SLR and used the sun as a key light (which I had to dampen to prevent severe shadows) and three lights for more key, fill and hair light. The set up looked like this:

Four light sources

Shooting a picture of hot peppers at Marlboro College Center for Graduate and Professional Studies

Below you will find four pictures (out of close to a hundred) that came from the shoot, but let me say first that I tried different angles, different ways to set the shot using thirds, tried moving and lessening the shadows, played with manual and autofocus, and after an hour or so I was exhausted! All the variables really started to make my head spin – this wasn’t just an exercise in photography, it felt like physical exercise too.

I brought all the shots into ‘Photos’ on my Mac laptop, threw away about 75% of them and started editing them with the tools and threw away about a dozen more. My major take-away was that even though I thought I was taking advantage of the rule of thirds in my shooting, I could see in the editing, as I cropped, that I really didn’t know what I was doing at all – so the post production cropping didn’t have as much on an impact as I had hoped – I have so much more to learn in that arena.

I think the lighting was good – I put most of my energy into that. If I were to do this shoot again I would bring in some every day objects to shoot alongside the peppers and not just use a white background – bowls, napkins, cut peppers and the knives, etc.