"After" Edward Weston's Pepper #30 (1930) ... mine happened to have Image #1333 as the final in the series of bracketed exposures used to assemble an HDR-rendered "original" to edit.
Weston's version is considerably darker than I originally intended to make mine, and I couldn't get it as dark as his without what I considered unacceptable blocking-in of those shadow details I went to all the trouble of HDR exposing/processing to capture. A lighter/HDR version linked below.
Besides cutting a tiny sliver off the bottom of the pepper, I used a small glob of peanut butter en lieu of modeling clay to help hold the pepper steady. Light was almost directly above, and slightly behind and to the left.
Alternate title: Ecstasy in Limbo
-Plastic grocery bag over swing-arm lamp to act as diffuser for CFL bulb
-Custom White Balance
-Tripod, timer, piece of white paper to the left to act as a weak reflector
-Manual mode, manual focus
-Focal Length: 242mm (35mm equivalent)
-Resize bracketed originals
-Merge bracketed originals using EnfuseGUI
-RGB Curve
-RGB Curve 2
-Create vignetted mask for background
-RGB Curve through mask to create slight nimbus (aura) effect
-Red Channel Curve
-RGB + Red Channel Curve
-Channel Mixer -> Monochrome
-RGB Curve
-Crop a bit from top and right
-Clone out speck below plate-edge reflection
-Some local dodging/burning along top of pepper
-USM at 8%/64 dia/TH = 0 (applied twice)
-USM at 88%/0.8 dia/TH = 7 (applied three times)
-Some local blurring to clear up sharpening artifacts
-SaveAs JPEG at quality 10/10 = 75KB
File: Pepper33_img_1329-33HDR=DPC3rt.jpg
Resized originals:
Setup:
Alternate edit:
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