The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Common object”, with a side dish of “Product photography”. My coffee machine has a delightful lighting of the coffee cup below it, so I took advantage of that and of the spot of light of the plants behind it to get a low-key image of an espresso pouring.
| Camera | Pentax K-1 II |
| Lens | smc PENTAX-D FA MACRO 100mmF2.8 WR |
| Focal length | 100mm |
| F-Number | F/13.0 |
| Exposure time | 5 s |
| ISO | 100 |
Coffee was the first shot that I got for the Hunt, just after I got the 100mm macro lens (which, by the way, I love to bits.) It took A LOT of takes before getting something I was satisfied with – and even here, the fact that the chocolate is not fully in focus is a bit sad, I think.
The major hurdle with shooting liquids is that they tend to splatter – especially when dropped from some height, as it is on my coffee machine; it took a fair amount of careful cleaning to get the espresso foam line reasonably clean without destroying it. My first shots also didn’t have a spoon; it took a while to get the spoon in at the right angle for the picture. All the things that I could have fixed in postprocessing were obviously to be fixed in camera for a SOOC challenge!
But eventually, the stars aligned enough that I decided that it was good enough; this felt like a fairly long picture session, but I like the final image!
The edited version of the same concept would be something like this:
(And yes, the chocolate got composited from a picture where it was sharper 😉 )
And the full album of my Scavenger fellows is here: Coffee.
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