Passion Fruit

nobody@flickr.com (~ Maree ~) — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 10:59:11 -0800

~ Maree ~ posted a photo:

A year in pictures ~ Week 7 of 52, Seasonal Fruit and Vegetables

Worth viewing on the lighbox - hit L to see if you agree ;-)

This was always scheduled for the week of Valentine's day, trying to keep with seasonal fruit and veg, but also where possible pop them into an appropriate calendar context. After the event I realised that this is the first image of the batch to be shot in landscape format, and this could cause issues for print consistency if I decide to go down that road. I may have to revisit it when I get a chance. In the meantime, I wanted to play with shaped bokeh, something that I've seen done a number of times, and I've been itching to try for myself. It is a lot of fun, but I went in guessing the size of the cutout, and I must have tried six or seven times before getting it the way I'd wanted!

As for the fruit - it is up there with my absolute favourites. I love the smell, the taste just screams tropics and is about as close to a natural sweet as it's possible to get. It's magical that a fruit that can appear to be wrinkled, dryed out and not very exciting can reveal such nectar once it's been broken open. The contents of the opened fruit lasted about 30 seconds after I thought I'd nailed the shot! I'm so enthused by the fruit in fact, that it would be easy to imagine that it had got its name from filling the eater with a fruity passion, but in reality it gets its name from the flower of the genus Passiflora or passion flower. The name is supposed to have originated from the symbolic association of various parts of the flower to the Passion of Christ before the Crucifixion. I find that kind of etymology quite fascinating. (If you're not familiar with it, the flower is extremely beautiful, we also have a non edible species that is grown in gardens here in the UK).

ISO100, f1.8 @ 1/125s. 50mm prime with heart shaped cutout on front of lens. I used a softbox with a purple gel to set the scene, a string of small LED lights for the bokeh, and a snooted flash on minimum power as the keylight on the fruits. The open aperture is great for creating lovely bokeh, but hard to get the point of focus spot on. I think viewed full size it works ok, but in the smaller version I'm not happy with the clarity of the seeds on the near fruit.

Uploads from ~ Maree ~, tagged f18

Passion Fruit