Photographer Turns Fruits and Vegetables into Surreal Lanterns

It's not often that you get to say a cauliflower looks eerie—a pumpkin, maybe, but not a cauliflower. In Radu Zaciu's photographic series The Light Inside, however, the Romanian photographer uses fluorescent light bulbs to illuminate everything from a pear to a strawberry, and the results turn his subjects into spooky, surreal lanterns.

Zaciu drills small holes inside the fruits so he can insert the required light sources, and then photographs them using long exposure in a dark space to capture the faint light that shines through.

On his Flickr page, he explains:

The light coming from its core gives the subject a different appearance from what we are used to. Not every fruit or vegetable transmits the light properly and some need more, while others need a less powerful light source. Carving into the fruit needs to be done carefully and not more than necessary to place the light source somehow central. For harder vegetables a drill is ideal to carve a symmetrical channel of an ideal size.  

Check out some of the series below, and head to Zaciu's Flickr to see more.

Strawberry

H/t Petapixel

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