EMPS: Apple Bubbles

This week for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, Carly wants to see Apples. So naturally I went into the bedroom where our apples are kept, and photographed these:



Confused yet? How about this?



This is how Costco sells at least some of its apples: in plastic bubbles. Open the plastic and here are (what's left of) the apples:



Here's a better shot of the bubble shell packaging. If you look closely you can see the green of pears and mangoes underneath the apples:



The explanation: John has been on a juice fast, living on concoctions of juiced fruits and vegetables. He recently took a couple of weeks off of from his nothing-but-juice regimen, but when he's going all out, and I'm buying salads and veggies and such for my own diet, the fridge gets very full! That's when we put some of the hardier fruit in the bedroom, which has A/C going at least part of the time.

The bad part is that the dresser the apples are on is under the window, and also it seems excessive to run the room's air conditioner 24 hours a day for the sake of apples, pears, mangoes, Cayenne and Pepper. So I only run it most of the time.

Today after I photographed the apple bubbles, I pulled a pear from underneath and ate part of it. It was old and mushy. Guess that's what we get for not juicing it soon enough!

One last shot. I deliberately left this at the wrong rotation for artistic purposes. This way, the bubbles and apples look like strange ornaments, or maybe a bunch of grapes.



Be sure to check Ellipsis every week for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot!

Karen

EMPS: Citrus - in the Fridge and in the Yard

For the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #134, Carly wants to see Citrus Fruit, specifically our most and least favorites. My favorite, Clementines, are a little hard to come by this time of year, but here's what's on hand:


Limes for John's juice fast.


My citrus of choice, most of the time.


I've been cutting back on soda, even though I only drink diet, and experimenting with water and flavored water. This is an orange flavored water, lit by orange light. It's not as good as Diet Sunkist or Diet Crush. I'm not sure it's even better than basic Arrowhead water.


We've been working on having home-grown citrus. John planted this tangerine tree about two years ago. Tangerines were my favorite until I discovered clementines.


This grapefruit tree, planted within a month or so of the tangerine one, barely survived last winter. It replaces a mature grapefruit tree that died about four or five years ago. I'm not a fan of grapefruit. At all.

Karen

EMPS: Better Fruit, But At a Price

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #95: Organic Food, I naturally went to the grocery store, specifically my faithful Safeway up the street. A few years ago, they revamped their produce department to make things look that much nicer, especially their organic produce section. I've photographed items from it before, but it was a different season and a slightly different topic. Let's see what I found to photograph this time!



Here is just part of their organic display. I like the variety of colors and textures, and the Farmer's Market look of the crates filled with, um, not sure what, possibly wood shavings.



Much of Tucson's produce comes from Mexico, including the organic stuff, and even including some of the more obscure varieties. Look at all the colors and sizes of tomatoes in this one bin!



When I was a kid, we used to grow cherry tomatoes every year, starting with vines in planters in the dining room or kitchen window, and later moving them outside. They were always red when ripe, always bigger than the tiny tomatoes one sees in salads now. Nowadays it's all about grape tomatoes and other newly-developed variants on the basic tomato. But here are "heirloom" cherry tomatoes. I think that means they are grown from the original genetic strain of decades ago.



Plums. Again, I like the variety of color here. If I thought they were actually soft and juicy, instead of rock-hard like the regular non-organic ones, I'd be tempted to buy a few. But they cost about three or four times as much as the regular ones, and money is tight.



But I did buy one organic indulgence: this carton of blackberries. Yum!

Be sure to check Ellipsis every Monday for the Monday Photo Shoot! And I'll be back in a day or two with tales of the weekend's photographic adventures. Wedding photographer? Me? Yipes!

Karen

EMPS #5: Focusing on Fruit

For this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, Carly is asking for still life photography featuring fruit. Now, except for some past-their-prime organic grapes (they were pretty much inedible the night I bought them), I had no fruit in the house; and being on an austerity budget until I'm employed again, I couldn't exactly go out and buy a lot of produce. Not at today's prices. I haven't bought any fruit or veggies at all lately unless it was on sale. But it's the Monday Photo Shoot! I never miss the Monday Photo Shoot! So I went to Safeway tonight anyway. (Come to think of it, I forgot to get two of the non-fruit items I intended to buy.)

Still life arrangement, Safeway style

I've mentioned several times recently that my local Safeway, from whose parking lot I've filmed so many wonderful sunsets, has recently been spruced up in a big way. There was nothing wrong with it before, but now it's got all-new signage, a Starbuck's, new display cases, wooden flooring in Produce and so on. Produce is where the changes are most profound, because of the fruit stand / farmer's market look they've affected, especially for the organic items. So I figured, if a still life is the art of arranging items, choosing the lighting and composing the shot, why not let Safeway do the first part of that for me?

Pumpkins and golden pineapples at Safeway

Small Granny Smiths. I can't afford to buy, only photograph!

But okay, that's probably not quite in the spirit of the assignment. So I bought a single apple (large Granny Smith, $1.89 a pound), and a "personal watermelon" ($2).


Lighting is a big part of the art of still life, I gather, and we haven't had adequate lighting in the kitchen since Cayenne broke the vintage overhead light. So I arranged my two green, round edibles on a kitchen towel next to the stove, turned on the stove light, and took a number of shots without flash. This was the best of them.


Then I took a few more with flash.

In the editing, I used effects on most of the shots. The one above is with the "watercolor" effect applied. Or was it the acrylic one? Yes, that's right. It's the acrylic one.

Psychedelic fruit!

But why limit the effects to the semi-realistic? If still life photography is largely about the lighting, let's play with the lighting effects! This is the "solarization" lighting effect, followed by a negative effect, and then solarization again, and then tone adjustment to lighten things a bit. Result: a magical golden apple!

Be sure to check out Carly's blog Ellipsis every Monday for the new EMPS topic, and to see links to the previous week's participants. I look forward to seeing all your entries.

Karen

(Another entry will follow later tonight. Probably.)