Inside the Onion

Yesterday I took the portrait of the million dollar onion and altough I liked the photo quite well, I had to make an image of Inside the Onion …

Here it is. The portrait of the halfed onion.

Despite the subject beiing an halfed onion, I had no troubles with tears while shooting 😉

I placed the onion with the inside a an slight angle to the camera. This should allow to show a bit of the structure, when lit the right way. The table is a black glas table. The only difficulty I had here, was dust that came again and again. So when working with glas, its always good to have a glas cleaning towel at hand and a dust blower makes your life easier as well.

The onion would not stand upright on its own, so I stuck a fork in its back (once more) to stabilize it. This still was not perfect. The onion would not fall back, but it still tended to lean on one side or the other. So a bit of a sticky, removable paste helped to stick the fork to the table and to disable any movement. Don’t know the english name for that paste, but its made for temporary mounts on walls etc. Since you can remove it without residue it is perfect for photography.

I have two speedlights at hand. A Canon 540 EZ and a 430 EX. Together with my Yongnou remote triggers I am able to cover a lot of different lighting scenarios. An all without cables. Yes!

The main light was the 540EZ in a DIY Saberlight placed overhead the camera near the subject. The goal was to have a even light distribution on the onion without losing detail and keeping the shadows on the top. The 430EX had a DIY grid mounted and was placed on the camera right, behind the subject and pointing to the top of the onion to provide some separation.