Teacup

I started drinking a lot of tea lately to replace coffee. I wanted to create a picture to represent the warm feeling of a nice cup of tea.

So here's the setup. My friend brought over a nice piece of wood, an extension piece from his table. We have one light in around 45° angle from the teacup. We used this light because of 1. I had one and 2. it projects a warmer light than a flash.

I play table tennis so we used 1 half to block the light partly. I wanted to mimic sunlight coming from a window. I used the other half to make the background darker. I placed a blanket to cover the white center line.

We used a circular reflector with the gold side to light up the plant in the background. For the steam, we tried to make fresh tea with boiling water but there wasn't that much steam for the camera to capture. So what we did was lighting a match and blowing it out on top of the cup. For some reason, the smoke stayed in the cup.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm F/1.2.

This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color)

And this is edited.

50mm 1/60s F/1.8 ISO 200