Last BBQ Of Summer

I wanted to capture the essence of summer, BBQ. To have my shot backlit meant I need to take this shot in the morning as that's where the sun rises. I waited until the end of September to take this shot so the sun would be in a better position to clean the trees without being too high. I took this shot at 9:30 AM.

Here's the setup:

I had to place the BBQ on a box so that it would be leveled to the patio railing which I'm using to place my beer. I used a reflector but I don't like the reflector in my beer bottle. No reflector or a flash would've been better.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T20 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

The first thing was to reduced those harsh highlights from the sun reflecting on the steak and railing. I also bumped the shadows a bit, made it warmer with whitebalance and split toning. The smoke is really important here and to have more emphasis on it, I bumped the clarity but also removed some clarity to the right side of the image.

50mm 1/750s F/? ISO 200

Sometimes, people may think it's weird to cook a steak at 9:30 am with a beer (by the way, it's a dark beer and it was drank the previous day, it's coffee in it). But I knew I was going to get a great image out of this and sometimes you have to push through those instincts telling you it's weird.