Romanian photographer Radu Zaciu has been experimenting recently with photographing fruits and vegetables using internal lighting. He places bulbs inside and uses that as the main light source for his series of glowing images. The project is called “The Light Inside.”
He starts by drilling or carving holes into the fruits and veggies. The holes need to be big enough to fit a light bulb, but not so big that it completely removes the flesh of the “subject” (which helps give a glow color that unique to the fruit).
“It all started with a game of words,” Zaciu tells us. “The German word for light bulb is ‘gluehbirne’, what literally means ‘glowing pear’.” His first attempt was literally with a pear, which he photographed as a light bulb:
After seeing how beautiful the internal lighting made the fruit, he decided to try the same thing with other fruits and veggies. Zaciu used small light bulbs from flashlights for smaller fruits and 220V 40W light bulbs for larger ones.
The amount of light shining through is quite weak, so Zaciu shoots in complete darkness and uses long exposure times of more than 10 seconds to properly expose the subjects. He also throws in a tiny bit of light painting for things like leaves in order to light them for the shots.
Here are some of the photographs in the project so far:
Cauliflower
Cabbage
Strawberry
Potato
Kiwi
Fennel
Cauliflower
Endive
Christmas Melon
Celery Root
Cabbage
Pineapple
You can follow along with this project and find these images in higher resolutions in this Flickr set.
Image credits: Photographs by Radu Zaciu and used with permission
Started out doing photography at the age of 6 using an uncle's old 1940 kodak brownie box camera. At 15 years of age, I decided to buy my very own 1975 Praktica SLR camera. I now shoot with a Nikon D850. I do unpaid TFP and commercial paid work.