By André Costantini
I sometimes find myself drawn to images that are seemingly surreal; ones that look as if they have been manipulated (other then by virtue of using a camera.) In a way, every image is a manipulation. But some appear to be more manipulated then others. My thoughts wander to the surrealist painter René Magritte and his use of the apple as an icon. There was one painting in particular that was simply an apple in a room, however the apple was so large that its mass was like a nightmare. The apple displacing space and it's relationship was terrifying. Sometimes, he would paint apples as if they were floating. And this leads me to the photograph above. In my yard, there are a dozen apple trees which decided to bear fruit. In past years, the blossoms were destroyed by frost or there were not enough bees to pollinate the flowers. Many of these apples look more like heirloom tomatoes in that the skins are textured and the apples are quite irregular by supermarket standards. But these peculiarities I find attractive. Between the texture of the skin and my propensity to surrealism, I wanted to see if I could create an image that might embody both. The apple appears to almost be floating, but it is simply the relationship between the background and the lighting. Normally one would expect the light to come from the top and shadow to be underneath the apple as it would usually sit. The illusion is created by placing the apple on its back and and using window light from several different sides to illuminate it while photographing it from above. The image was shot with the Tamron SP 28-75 f2.8 lens at f5.6 1/60 ISO1600.
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