When I attended the Alberta College of Art I had an instructor who was a master in the darkroom and a fan of Edward Weston. Weston is famous for a lot of photographs, but his pepper series where extraordinary. In our first semester of photography classes our instructor had us do our own pepper series exploration. The rules of the assignment were that we could only use one light source and they had to be hot lights, in this case Mole Richardson's that are typically used on film sets. The college had a variety of models and we could use what ever we wanted to manipulate the light. One of the problems was that for their perceived brightness the intensity really wasn't that strong for film stock of the day (this was done in the fall of 1993). Thus with 100 iso film (in this case T-max) exposure times were in the 1/4 to 1/2 second range with f-stops around f4. The other thing is they did get very hot. It was not uncommon to cook a pepper as you photographed it (I even burned a few) or have the foam core flats used as reflectors to melt. We also had to do a new pepper every day for 15 weeks. With 20 of us doing this assignment the studio always smelt of peppers and to this day I can not stand the smell or taste of them.
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