And the fruit is photographed…
4 minute read
August 5, 2012, 9:00 PM
At last, it is done. I went down to Eastern Market earlier today and did something that I said I’d wanted to do for a while: photograph food. I visited most of the food vendors over there and photographed the fresh fruits and vegetables that were out for sale. I photographed so many different kinds of tomatoes, peppers, and mushrooms that it’s not even funny. I certainly got a lesson in foods, though. I didn’t realize that tomatoes came in so many different colors. First, there’s this one, which looks pretty conventional, at least to my grocery store shopping eyes:
And then there’s this one, the Cherokee Green:
And these, the Heirloom Vintage Wine tomato:
And then these, the Heirloom Green Zebra tomato:
And there were more. The same thing applied to peppers as well, with even more dramatic differences, coming in red, yellow, orange, green, and even purple (who’da thunk?), and in as many different shapes as you could imagine. I obviously need to go to more farmers’ markets for my produce and get out of the frozen food aisle at Giant. It was quite a learning experience, and I could definitely have fun with these interesting looking foods.
I also had a great time in the process. And exemplifying the fact that despite the large population of the Washington DC area, it’s still a small town at heart, look who I ran into:
I ran into Ginny, a former coworker of mine, and her boyfriend Kyle. You may remember Ginny from the “Xenu Burgers” Journal entry back in 2010, and along with Kyle from the anti-Walmart rally in 2011. I hadn’t seen them since the anti-Walmart rally, and so it was great to catch up! Funny how we got together this time. I was talking to one of the vendors about the photo work I was doing, and then I heard a female voice jump into the conversation and mention me by name. And it was Ginny! How cool was that.
And then my visit to Eastern Market went remarkably smoothly. My focus was on food, and so I skipped over all of the arts and crafts vendors on purpose. The idea there is that I don’t want to accidentally inspire people to copy these folks’ works vs. going out and buying the ones sold here, plus you have copyright issues with derivative works that I don’t want to mess with anyway. Besides, you can’t copyright a tomato. As mentioned before, food doesn’t need to pose, nor does it move, and the vendors for the most part loved my photography work. I only had a problem with one vendor in the indoor part of the market, and that was really minor. In that instance, there was just too much going on and not enough space in that spot, and the lady running that particular stand and I both realized around the same time that photography just wouldn’t work. So I moved on and wished her a good day.
Then when it came to the weather, it was something of a mixed bag. It was hot and humid in Washington around midday with the high forecasted for 93 degrees, and with the humidity, I’m almost certain that the heat index was over 100. That was expected. But as it turned out, I really lucked out with the weather for this outing. Not long after I got home, the sky got really dark, and it started raining like crazy, with thunder and lightning. That would have been a Bad Thing for me at Eastern Market. While there’s plenty of shelter at the market itself, going to the Metro from Eastern Market has some large open areas where one could get hit with lightning or rained on, and then of course if the weather turned bad while I was there, that would have ended my photo session, meaning I had wasted several hours out of my day. At home, I instead pulled out the camera again and got better photos of the gutter spillover thing that happens whenever it rains really hard. I photographed it before with the lightning, but you can’t really see it too well in those photos. Here’s what it looks like:
The rain coming off the gutters and down onto the balcony.
The amount of rain hitting the balcony from the gutter at about the peak of it all.
This whole thing with the gutters happens in that one spot whenever it rains, and it’s always amusing when it happens. I figure there’s something in that area of the gutters that’s blocking the flow of water, thus why it only overflows there, but I could be wrong. Feel free to leave a comment below if you have your own theories or what have you. I probably should call the maintenance people about it, but it’s kind of low on my list.
Then the fruit and vegetable photos are going to become a Photography set. Don’t know what I’m going to call it just yet, though, but I’m sure something will come to mind.
Postscript: Also, on an unrelated note, the recap of my recent Chicago trip is going to be a Life and Times set this year, and I'm going to do it more like a highlights reel. I got a lot of photos, but there's not really much of a story to tell. So I'll see what I come up with.
Categories: Photography, Washington DC, Weather