This photo is a minor miracle in as much as it’s of a home-grown tomato and we’ve been fighting blight in the greenhouse almost since the plants went in. I consulted my bible of organic food growing (Geoff Hamilton’s Organic Gardening) and discovered that it’s acceptable for organic growers to spray with copper fungicide. So that’s what I’ve been doing at fortnightly intervals.

The plants are pretty much thriving now – still an odd spot or two of blight but it’s basically under control and we now have ripe fruit. I wish I’d known this before I lost my potatoes. This is a ‘Merlot’ picked only a few moments before the shot was taken and we’ll also be eating potatoes dug up from the blighted plants – there are some tubers, though relatively few compared to what I’d have expected.

I’d like to think it’s also a bit of a miracle of mine in more ways than one. Since my photography course last year, I’ve been working hard on lighting techniques and this has been the result of thirty shots with different lighting set-ups. Our studio is pretty well kitted out but we don’t have every gadget and gizmo going so in the final shot, there is a soft box lighting the front and a snoot for the catch light at the back but with the very low-fi addition of a bit of paper over the snoot to soften the light – no snoot gave too big a disk of light and while the snoot controlled that it made too harsh a reflection off the fruit.

I’m not sure if I’d have got the same effect with a reflector at the back, that’s for another day to experiment with – I got my shot today and ‘ran for it’, not wanting to spend any more time than necessary to find my shot.

The fact that there probably doesn’t need to be any more ‘tomato shots’ in the world doesn’t really worry me – what’s good for me is that I’ve ended up with a shot I’m really pleased with that’s lighting was thought through and executed how I wanted. That’s not really something I’d have done a year ago. I had a few ‘standard set ups’ then that I used over and over again. These days, I try to find the right set up for the subject.

Last year, we were enjoying Iain and Beck's company and I was shooting weird stuff.