Morning Coffee

Later this winter, when I was making coffee, I noticed the nice light from the sun shining on the countertop. This was taken at 8PM on March 28th. The sun changes position and rising time so this kind of light is only during the end of March. I thought this would make a great picture.

Here's the setup:

The background was the biggest challenge. How do I make it less boring? I think the oven in the background is a little distracting but there's no way getting around that. I placed the sugar pot to fill in the empty space. I could've moved it a bit more to the left though.

This is a Vietnamese coffee maker. It makes super-strong coffee so I add water to make an americano. If you like coffee, you should definitely check it out.

This was shot with my Fujifilm X-T3 + Rokinon 50mm 1.2. This is out of camera raw with Lightroom presets (Adobe Color):

I wanted a high contrast dreamy morning look. The light in my setup shot looks so much stronger compared to this and that's because my setup shot is actually the next day as I forgot to take one. The light in my shot was softer and was easier to work with. The warmer look comes from split toning. So not much local editing here. I desaturated the oranges and lifted the oranges in HSL. I lifted the blacks in the tone curve to help with that old/dreamy look.

50mm 1/15s F/2 ISO 160

Yeah, there are some things like the sugar pot being too close and maybe the coffee maker could've been turned so the handle would be parallel to the cup. I agree with the sugar pot but sometimes if things are too perfect, it feels staged and not time capture.