Little Strawberry
21 July 2006 · 08:04 · Back garden, Whitfield, Kent
Two days after the heatwave peak, the garden was still running warm enough that early morning was the sensible time to be outside with a camera. The climbing strawberry plants were trained on canes against the north-east face of the house, in the shade that the red brick wall holds until the sun has climbed high enough to clear the roofline. In the early morning the wall itself was still in shadow, producing that warm ruddy-brown that glazed brick offers when it is lit indirectly — not the flat red of direct sun, not the cold grey of full shade, but something between the two that photographs well as a background precisely because it is a background: present enough to give the image warmth and depth, not so present as to compete with what is in front of it.
The fruit in the image is not fully ripe. Strawberry ripening proceeds from the tip upward, which is why the lower portion reads as the deeper red and the shoulders around the calyx are still carrying green. The achenes — the small pale structures embedded in the surface, which are technically the fruit in botanical terms, the red flesh being an enlarged receptacle — are still yellow-green in places, a sign of a berry that is a few days away from the table. The fine hairs covering the surface are visible under the 100mm macro, giving the skin a slightly textured quality that the eye does not normally register when picking and eating. At f/6.3, with enough depth of field to keep most of the fruit sharp while the stem and background dissolve, the heatwave light — even indirect, even in shade — was sufficient at ISO 400 to manage 1/60s without camera shake.
The specific strawberry variety was one suited to growing vertically on canes, with the fruit hanging rather than resting on the ground in the conventional manner. This is not a growing technique that was widely adopted by commercial growers, who tend to prefer the horizontal arrangement for ease of picking, but for a garden wall it had the advantage of getting the fruit out of reach of slugs and keeping it clearly visible as it developed. The way this one is hanging, stem uppermost and berry downward, is not a staged composition but simply the way the plant presented itself to the lens.
Canon EOS 1Ds Mark II · EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro · f/6.3 · 1/60s · ISO 400
