Orange Pepper No. 1

Orange Pepper No. 1
Habanero peppers from the garden, awaiting their fate as pepper jelly.

Orange Pepper No. 1. © Copyright 2021 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Habanero peppers from the garden, awaiting their fate as pepper jelly.

Not just orange peppers but habanero peppers, one of the hotter varieties. I ended up growing a habanero pepper plant in the vegetable garden this year and the darned this was extremely productive. If you know your peppers, you perhaps understand that you probably don’t need a whole lot of habaneros — a little of its heat goes a long ways. So, finding myself with dozens of them, I made jelly. Batch #1 was so good that I picked the rest of the crop, and most of them will end up in batch #2.

The path to deciding to photograph them is a bit contorted. A group of friends and photographers get together periodically (these days in the virtual world) to share photographs on some sort of theme. This month’s theme was the color orange. I have a ton of photographs of orange aspen leaves — not surprising for the guy who wrote a book on photographing aspen color! — but that seemed too obvious. So I set out to look for orange things in my neighborhood and home. A few things surprised me. The first was how vague and variable the concept of “orange’ becomes once you pay attention — at the fringes it bleeds across into red, yellow, and/or brown. The second surprise was how few of these orange things spoke to me as photographs. (Some did, and you’ll see more of them soon.) Then, just as I thought I was done.. right in front of me, on the kitchen counter, was this example of orange!


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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