The Spice Series
June 19, 2022
I've always been fascinated with spices in their whole form. The intriguing aromas and distinctive shapes, colors, textures, and what seem to be imperfections draw me in. So what better to experiment with at home than photographing the contents of those jars in my kitchen drawer!
For the setup, I chose a uniform and matte black background in the form of a dinner plate, in order to take away any distraction and highlight the intricate variations in color and texture of the spices. I was looking for a moody ambiance rather than a brightly lit product image, and a black plate lent itself beautifully for that. The lighting was indirect, purely from ambient light through a window about 10 feet away.
As I wanted to create these moody images, ensuring perfect focus was critical. The autofocus of my 50mm lens actually did a great job, but I chose to slightly adjust it manually for better control. The depth of field was maximized with the smallest diaphragm possible on my lens. This, together with the low light conditions, resulted in exposure times typically between 8 and 13 seconds. To accommodate the short distance between lens and subject, I inverted the center bar of my tripod so that the camera was at the bottom of the bar, facing towards the plate on the floor, with minimally extended tripod legs.
This turned out to be an interesting exercise in composition: how to arrange the spices on the plate? Seemingly haphazard and random, or tightly controlled and neat? Settling somewhere in the middle between those two, the center of the composition was placed in the center of the frame cropped to a square, as a more intricate composition might have just taken away from the simplicity of the subject matter. In this way, the focus of the images could remain on the textures and imperfections that made the spices so interesting.
Top row: bay leaves, Himalayan salt. Middle row: chile de Arbol, star anise. Bottom row: cardamom, Szechuan pepper.