Burn: Photographing Mexican Chiles

When I started putting together our Soleducational Spanish courses one of the first things I did was take lots of photos of chiles.

I began by photographing the chiles against all different types of hot-coloured backgrounds – gold, pink, purple.
I even made a painted background to see how that worked.
And I photographed them all on white, thinking that a white background would be best if I wanted to cut-out the chiles.
In the end the white backgrounds only worked for the insides of the textbooks, which were printed in black and white. For the videos I found it was best to do cut-outs of the chiles from the coloured paper backgrounds – that way they had a coloured edge that blended into the coloured backgrounds in the video better the the white edges. I put the cut-out chiles into After Effects and made them dance.
Then I tried to make them HOT! Burn, baby, burn.
A serrano and a jalapeño fire dancing.
When I started looking for some colourful web interpretations, I put the textured painted backgrounds through some photo apps. I think Pixlromatic made this serrano chile pretty hot.
More about chiles on our Soleducational website, all in Spanish of course!