Temptation

It’s been a great summer for the fruit growers. The apple trees round here are groaning with fruit. Time to get a few photographs them before they’re picked.

But … hang on … photographs of apples ain’t all that interesting.

No they’re not.

So if you’re going to photograph the mundane, try to get a different angle on it.

I photograph apples on trees because there’s a market for such images. Not a huge one, admittedly, but magazines, brochures, books and guides sometimes want them. And the buyers are always on the lookout for fresh angles.

So I’ve been trying to oblige. I found a photogenically curved and laden branch, fitted a wide angle lens and got down for a low viewpoint. I also angled my camera slightly to get the branch swooping into the image, and include a little bit of the rest of the orchard in the background to give context …

Another approach is to make a story out of the image. Here it’s my hand in the picture. I had the camera on a tripod, reached up to pick the apple and fired the shutter with a remote release. And, no, the sky hasn’t been ‘Photoshopped’. I used a polarizing filter to make a deeper blue ...

Further technical note – Both photographs were made in bright sunlight. But that’s a very harsh light source. So I used on-camera flash in both images to fill in the shadows.