Nearly forgot about this challenge until the night before when I was making espresso for me and my wife. I had both handles of the mugs pointed the same way, so I grabbed some quick shots before they got cold. The 2 minute attempt returned horrible results (big surprise) so I returned to a espresso setup the night after.
At first, I tried a top down approach. There was a certain balance to the photo which was nice, but not awesome. So after spending some time editing that shot, I went back to my setup and was about to take it down when I noticed how this looked from a tilted angle. I changed the camera position, but left the lighting practically the same. This result was much nicer (as agreed upon by my wife), and my entry was born.
Lighting for this was a bit contrived. I had a flash firing through an umbrella from camera right. It was just a bit higher than the scene, pointed slightly down, and raking the light across the back of the mugs. Another flash was setup with a DIY snoot attached, almost directly in front of the camera, and right above the mugs. It was pointed at a 5-in-1 reflector with the silver side pointed towards the front of the cups. This second flash was much lower power to help increase the dramatization of the shadows.
Post Processing;
* Topaz Adjust - started with the French Countryside preset to add coffee colored warmth and softness
* Crop
* Increase saturation with lower vibrancy
* S-curve with a bit extra for the highlights
* Burn a couple of the brighter beans to make them blend in more
* Export as TIFF
* Resize
* Sharpen Edges
* Save as JPEG
Statistics
Place: 63 out of 126 Avg (all users): 5.5379 Avg (commenters): 6.4000 Avg (participants): 5.3710 Avg (non-participants): 5.6627 Views since voting: 505 Views during voting: 226 Votes: 145 Comments: 6 Favorites: 0
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