Bananas

From Photo of the day (2009)

I did take some farm animal pictures, but this one that I've entered into a challenge for DP Challenge has beat them out. The challenge was "skin" - and to take a photo of some kind of skin. Don't know how this will do but I started off with the idea of cow/goat/dog skin then thought.. what else has skins? Bananas have skins.. then thought of the saying "wolf in sheep's clothing" and tried to figure out how I could do a play on words - ended up with "wolf in a sheep's skin" and stuck a jalepeno in my banana. It's remarkably hard to set up a photo to match an image you see in your mind, especially with limited studio equipment. This weekend I had tried this differently with single bananas and used my door mat and the light from the window. I even entered two of them (one replaced the other) and then I replaced the last one of those with this. I had to go buy more bananas. This one I did a lot more setup. I got a big sheet of white poster board I had hanging around and taped it over my kitchen counter so there would be no edges or corners in my background. I used a really pathetically dim reading light I got from Ikea to light it from the side for the shadow because it had a stand and a flexible neck so I could aim it however I wanted. And then I used my tripod so I could have a large F-stop which meant a long shutter speed. Oy. All for a still shot of bananas. I doubt this is the sort of thing they will be looking for but at least it will be original.

I messed around with a curves adjustment layer in photoshop to lighten it up a bit more without blowing out the contrast in the front banana.