I have had this idea of a hot sauce image just sitting in my head for a while and I also haven't seen many hot sauce images on the internet, so this was perfect opportunity for me to create this piece. This is a personal project of mine based on one of my favorite shows on Youtube "Hot Ones" by First We Feast and Complex Media. They have their own sauce which is supposed to be one of the hottest sauces in the world with over 2,000,000 scoville units. So one of my friends who was visiting New York brought me a bottle.
I have now personally tried this sauce and it was by no surprise, extremely spicy. I really wanted to incorporate that feeling of heat (possibly pain) and spice into this image while trying to make it look somewhat spectacular at the same time. The result was this explosion of fire and chili in a moody, dark void surrounding the bottle.
The bottle and chilies were shot separately with a medium format camera in a quite simple studio environment, then composited into one image in Adobe Photoshop. For the flames and sparks I used simple stock photos I had beforehand.
