I’m obsessed with light, fascinated by inner beauty and needed to create a photograph for the Food Photographer of the Year…that & needed an article for my photography education blog; Lightism; for non-photographers & photographers alike.
I’ve often daydreamt about how to light up people from the inside and wondered if I could utilize this random thought into something creative and yet practical. So, I collected various foods which were transparent in some way and a number of light sticks from the local hardware store and shot this:
The peppers sprung a leak and over the long exposure you can see multiple drips, but I liked the result.
Then I moved on to eggs and started with chicken eggs and frankly was very frustrated by how disappointing they looked; both in colour and they just looked so very uninteresting.
So, I took a spoon and randomly tapped the surface to crack them to let some of the light come through; this was definitely more interesting:
Finally I wanted to try out other types of eggs and quail eggs from the supermarket where particularly successful. Interesting looking, small and each were surprisingly unique.
Again, I started with them intact, but soon smashed them up a little.
I had a mad idea about trying to insert a narrative to the picture and so used match sticks as arms, which made this amusing picture of a boxer:
For my final shot in this sequence, I smashed three quail eggs and I loved how each became even more unique:
So, if you want to have a play and make some interesting and creative images here is a step by step how to guide to lighting up objects from inside:
For the final shot, I actually made a photographic light using glow sticks and plumbers pipe: Instructions here:
