Colorful veggies

[Mike Buckley]

I went with friends to a farm that was selling vegetables not fit for their full-price offerings at a price of only $4 for a bag the size of a typical grocery bag.

Setup
The tabletop is a floor tile, though it's barely visible. A medium continuous-light lamp fitted with a diffusion sock is above the veggies slightly off center toward the top. A small continuous-light lamp fitted with a diffusion sock is in the front bottom area. The diffusion material and the lamps' positions very close to the scene create the softest possible shadows. A polarizer minimized glare.

[mugge]

Mike, great shot. On the negative side--- I don't like vegetables although my wife insists I do. -- not true.
Cheers Ole

[Shadowman]

Nicely captured.

[John 2]

A beautiful melange, a veritable ratatouille - and not a bad shot as well.

[bnnrcn]

Very colorful image Mike Has your lighting changed the usual color of the aubergines to a lighter purple? They have usually much darker color in my country.

[Mike Buckley]

Thank you, everyone!

Ole: Considering that we husbands rarely experience a good outcome after trying to convince our wives of what we like and don't like, your best bet probably is to let your wife continue thinking that you like veggies.

Binnur: I was as surprised as you by the color of the aubergines (also called eggplants), which I'm used to seeing in such a dark purple color that it is nearly black. I've also never seen the long, skinny shape of some of them in the photo. I actually wondered if they were aubergines and had to cut into them to make sure. Indeed, they are aubergines.

[ST1]

Very colourful image Mike, especially the aubergine I too have never seen that colour before. Be careful if you eat those chilli peppers, they could be hot.


Sent from somewhere in Gods County using Tapatalk

[Wavelength]

All these things are around me too...yet why i never can create such magic out of them????

[Marie Hass]

Nice shot. There are different varieties of eggplant. The longer thinner ones are the asian ones. They also come in white, etc.

[Mike Buckley]

Thank you, everyone!

Peter: I was told that most of the peppers are sweet rather than spicy. Even so, I'll be very careful.

[Merlin52]

Super saturated colours without losing detail Mike.

[Mike Buckley]

Thanks for the nod about the saturation, John.

It might interest you and others to know that I work very diligently to use saturation that appears relatively natural, in other words, as it naturally appears within the devised lighting setup. Using this photo as the example, the camera's saturation was set at a value of zero and the saturation was not increased either globally or locally during post-processing. Every tool available in my post-processing software indicates that there is no clipping in the red channel, which of course is often an issue.

The other technique I use with all of my photography is to do everything within reason to minimize or eliminate glare. That's because glare disguises the color and in the process reduces the image's overall appearance of saturation. (It also disguises texture and shape, but that's mostly irrelevant to this discussion.) When doing tabletop photography, I ensure that the lighting setup creates as little glare as possible. If any glare is evident, I then use a polarizer to minimize or eliminate it. If some glare still exists, even a small amount of it, I eliminate it during post-processing.

Many people might understandably think the saturation in this image is increased simply because when observing vegetables at the grocery store or in our homes, they don't normally look that saturated. That's because lots of glare is typically displayed on veggies during our normal daily activities. The presence of all that glare gives the impression of overall lower saturation.