The topic for week 22 is “blue.” This was actually a hard one to choose. It’s been overcast and cloudy here for a while now, so blue sky was out of the question. I also really didn’t want to just take random photos of blue things in my house… even my neighbor’s gorgeous blue flowers seemed too easy and obvious.
I actually came home from work today after a scant 2 hours with a raging migraine headache and realized that when I feel blue, I want to drink coffee. This was the perfect lead in to not only complete this photo challenge topic but also to try a technique I had read about online a while ago.
As usual I dragged all my photo crap upstairs and set up my makeshift studio on the kitchen table, which confuses the shit out of my mom every time she sees me do it. The key here is natural lighting (in my case the patio door), dark background (black sheet from goodwill!), and backlighting for the steam (flashlight i found in my backpack!). Overall, it was way harder than I thought it was going to be. I used a large aperture, fast shutter (otherwise it just blurs), and the backlighting thing. I did my best to set up a nice little backdrop with a coffee sack that Jessica and I bought in Hawaii, and some beans shamelessly scooped out of my grinder. (don’t worry, the beans got put back safe and sound!) Either way, here are the results. I want to try this again sometime with the black background moved further down the table and maybe jsut some boiling water. After nuking the coffee for at least 5 minutes it smelled like burning. Not cool!
