Hjdcti

I usually shot outdoor when plenty of natural light is available, so I don't really care about flash, reflectors, etc (mostly street photography, sometimes landscape).

After seeing the famous Edward Weston's Pepper No. 30, I think still life photography is really interesting, too.

I wonder what was the setup he used. Did he used a flash or a continuous light? And any reflectors, perhaps?

^{I've re-thunk this since first posting ;)}

Best guess is he just used natural light, not through his kitchen window, as I initially had assumed, because he states he didn't take it to the kitchen.

However, in the 1920s I would assume an artist would have an artist's loft*, with high, broad natural light... & a photographer would use one too, for similar reasons; that, combined with the reflected light inside the tin funnel the pepper was placed in & a 6-minute exposure, appear to have given him all he needed.

From Wikipedia - Pepper No 30

He first tried with plain muslin or a piece of white cardboard
as the backdrop, but for these images he thought the contrast between
the backdrop and the pepper was too stark. On August 3 he found a
large tin funnel, and, placing it on its side, he set a pepper just
inside the large open end. He wrote:

"It was a bright idea, a perfect relief for the pepper and adding
reflecting light to important contours. I still had the pepper which
caused me a week's work, I had decided I could go no further with it,
yet something kept me from taking it to the kitchen, the end of all
good peppers. I placed it in the funnel, focused with the Zeiss, and
knowing just the viewpoint, recognizing a perfect light, made an
exposure of six minutes, with but a few moments' preliminary work, the
real preliminary was on in hours passed. I have a great negative, ‒ by
far the best!"

By placing the pepper in the opening of the funnel, Weston was able to
light it in a way that portrays the pepper in three dimensions, rather
than as a flat image. It is this light that gives the image much of
its extraordinary quality.

One thing about still life, which I do a lot of myself, is it never gets bored.

It leaves you to do all the thinking. It doesn't shuffle its feet or want a cup of tea, & blur your image if it has to hang a round a while. A flower stalk wilting slightly over a focus stack taking 5 minutes is about the worst you'll have to deal with.

*There is an entire row of these houses near where I used to work in London, all designed North-facing but with huge windows to admit lots of broad, indirect light. It's known colloquially as Artist's Row, in Chiswick, West London..

Pic, Credit:© Philip Ide Photography

I also found a newspaper article in the Daily Mail with pictures of the interior of one of them - can I have one please??