It’s Chilli Outside!

Scotch Bonnet and Birdseye Chilli’s

I set myself the challenge of producing an image with predominantly one colour throughout, and I got this idea from a book I was reading. The setup is a couple of Scotch Bonnet chillies along with a handful of Birdseye chillies, all placed on a red plexiglass sheet. A single diffused lightsource was used to light the scene and create highlights on the chillies, while positioning the camera and flash in such a position to get no reflections on the plexiglass.

I love the waxy texture of the chilli skins. This contrasts beautifully with the plexiglass to give an overall interesting image. The image displayed is as recorded by the camera. Image was recorded directly into Capture One.

Taken with a Canon R6 mkii with a 100mm F2.8 L Macro IS USM lens. Single flash was a Godox AD600 BM fired at 1/4 power at 100 ISO and 1/200th of a second at f16.

Here’s the imaging setup. The scene is back/dide lit with the flash (diffused beauty dish used), with the camera set up high to avoid reflections. A white card flag was used opposite the flash to infill.

Using the AI generation function in Photoshop 2025, the above image was generated using my image as a base and placing the chilli arrangement into a red dish.

Thanks for looking,

Steve